


Passcode

by Fistful_of_Gamma_Rays



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Keith & Pidge | Katie Holt Friendship, Male-Female Friendship, Quintessence-Sensitive Keith (Voltron), Telepathic Bond, it may or may not be therapeutic, local youth bond over shared distrust of authority
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-05
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:28:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 28,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25735075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fistful_of_Gamma_Rays/pseuds/Fistful_of_Gamma_Rays
Summary: Psychic nonsense never stopped a good friendship.
Relationships: Keith & Pidge | Katie Holt
Comments: 169
Kudos: 165
Collections: Gentronweek





	1. Chapter 1

The Garrison empties out on the weekends. Cadets whose families are local go home, and those whose families aren’t head out to the town. Katie - _Pidge_ \- bullies the sergeant in the garage into letting her check out a bike. He definitely doesn’t believe she’s sixteen, but that’s what her ID says, so she signs the checkout list and the waiver, crams her backpack full of radio equipment into the saddlebags, and inches her way out the facility gates. 

( _Pidge_ has a license. Katie doesn’t. Katie has a few hours worth of stolen joyrides with Matt in the passenger’s seat, ready to take over if she lost control. She’s terrified the whole ride.)

She heads out to the desert, to the dusty service road off the highway that cuts right up to a high outcropping, far enough out from town to lose most of the local interference. She pulls the bike off the side, grabs her backpack, and starts walking. She sets up in the highest place she can get, and spends the new few hours tuning the gain and filtering, trying to clean up the spectrum enough to pick out clear signals on the Garrison bands. 

There’s a scrape behind her. “What are you doing here?”

She jumps and curses as she nearly overbalances her computer. She manages to right it, and turns around, heart still pounding.

The stranger’s maybe a few years older than her, with a long, sharp face and a shock of messy dark hair. He’s squatting at the other end of the outcropping, squinting at her equipment, one of the dingy orange and khaki shirts the Garrison hands out as casual wear tied around his waist.

“I’m testing something,” she says. “What are you doing here?”

He frowns. “I’m from around here. This is private property.”

“Oh.” She deflates.

His eyes flick again to her equipment. “You can finish up, but find somewhere else next time.”

“Fine. Thanks.”

He nods and wanders off into the scrub without another word. Katie - _Pidge_ \- watches him go, brows raised.

* * *

When she gets back that night, she looks up those coordinates on the city property map. They are definitely not private property.

That gets her curious (and honestly, a little pissed) and she goes digging for information on her visitor. At first she thinks he must be another cadet, but a quick perusal of the student directory doesn’t turn anything up. She’s nothing if not thorough though, and it takes only a little poking around to track down the previous year’s directory, still alive on the student intranet but not publicly linked. This strikes the jackpot and she gets a name to go with the face. 

She quickly learns that Keith Kogane had been a cadet on the fighter track up until the last year. He has honors scores in the first semester, but not the second, and he’s on the list of scholarship recipients. Nothing sticks out and she’s about to give it up as a waste of time when she finds his name in a photo caption for the student newsletter. It’s the night before the Kerberos launch. Not the public media circus, but the private event for official personnel and crew invitees only. She might even have been in the room when it was taken. 

The photographer’s focus is on Takashi Shirogane, the pilot. She had met Shiro a few times and liked him. He’d seemed kind and steady, and intelligent in an unassuming way. Matt had talked about him a lot, and he’d been a perennial character in her father’s work stories. In the photo, he’s looking away from the camera, saying something to Keith, just barely in-frame. Keith’s smiling back at him, an easy, open expression that makes him look like a completely different person. She wonders briefly what their relationship is. Cousins? Half-brothers, maybe?

It sinks her mood like a stone, sours her indignation into a heavy knot of guilt and grief rolling around in her gut. She can’t think of him as just some jerk out in the desert now. He’s someone else left behind by Kerberos, with no good answers for what happened. She wonders if he believes the official line about pilot error. If he blames Shiro for the mission’s failure.

She’s lost her taste for snooping. She kills the search and shuts the computer down. 

* * *

The rest of the week passes in a disorienting rush. She burns brain cycles and hours trying to remember where all her classes are and cramming all the material that she’s supposed to have studied but hasn’t. During lecture, she sits in the back of the hall and avoids the eyes of the instructors. On her downtime, she dodges the boys in her dorm and watches the bathroom like a hawk so she can use it when it’s unoccupied. She eats the crappy cafeteria food alone in a seat at the end of the hall and at night she curls up into the corner of her bunk and wonders if her mom’s okay. 

And in between all of it, she turns the problem of Keith Kogane over and over, like picking at a scab.

He shouldn’t even _be_ a problem. She doesn’t know him. She doesn’t owe him anything. He’s made it clear that he wants to be left alone and the easiest thing is to do just that.

But she keeps thinking about that photo. Whoever Takashi Shirogane was to him, he’s gone now. She knows the Kerberos lander didn’t crash. He should know it too.

The decision she makes in the end probably isn’t the smart one, but it might be moot anyways. The only contact information she can find for him leads straight back to the Garrison dorms. Maybe she could dig up something more with a more aggressive approach, but she’s not willing to call attention to herself by poking around in those kinds of databases. Without any other leads to go on, she decides on returning to the same place the next weekend.

* * *

It’s easy enough to find the same outcropping and set up her equipment, and she buries herself in tuning the low frequency filtering algorithms. She keeps an eye out this time, but he still manages to surprise her.

“I thought I told you not to come back.” He’s in nearly the same spot as last time. He’s wearing bike gloves and a black t-shirt, which is a weird choice for the weather, but he doesn’t seem bothered.

“It’s not private property. I checked.” He scowls, and she continues before he can say anything. “You’re Keith Kogane, right?”

There’s a little silence, and he shifts on his feet like he’s thinking about about making another exit, but eventually he answers. “Kogane.” He pronounces it with three syllables. “What about it?”

She fumbles a little bit. “You knew Takashi Shirogane, right? The Kerberos pilot?”

Instantly, his expression slams shut. “I’m not answering questions about Shiro.” He turns to go.

She gets up in a rush and nearly overbalances her computer again. “No, wait-”

He whips back around. “Look, I don’t care if you’re just curious or you don’t mean anything by it. Shiro had nothing to do with what happened to Kerberos. Just mind your own business and-”

He cuts off abruptly, his expression going sharp and distant, and for an instant she’s genuinely worried that he’s having a seizure or something. 

Then she hears it. 

It’s a low rumbling like thunder, but she looks up and finds the sky clear. There’s a pitch to it, an even rise and fall like a voice. Keith puts his hand to his chest, like he can feel it vibrating through his breastbone, and rocks subtly on his feet, his head tilted to the side. It goes on for maybe ten seconds before slowly dying away, leaving her gaping at the cloudless sky.

“What was that?”

Keith freezes for a second. His hand drops from his chest and he pins a careful, assessing stare on her. “You heard that?”

There are a lot of implications in that question, but she’s not about to analyze them now. “Yeah, I heard it. What was it?”

He watches her quietly for a long moment. “Who are you, anyways?”

She scowls in frustration. She really, really wants to push for an answer, but it feels like he’s about two seconds away from deciding it’s not worth it and walking off again. “Katie. Katie Holt,” she says after a moment, and sets her jaw. “My dad and brother were on Kerberos. I don’t think it was pilot error.”

“Oh.” His shoulders unhitch and he blinks. “You’re Matt’s sister.”

Hearing Matt’s name said so casually, as if he might be just out of sight somewhere, raises a lump in her throat. “Did you know him?”

He shakes his head. “Not really. I met him a couple of times.” He hesitates. “Did you know Shiro?”

“A little. Sometimes he came over for dinner. I heard a lot about him from Matt and my dad.”

They’re both quiet for a minute, and then Keith shifts and cranes his head to look at her equipment. “What is all that?”

“It’s for radio transmissions.” She bites her lip and eyes him a second before continuing in a rush. “It should be able to pick up signals coming from out in the Kuiper belt. I’m still tuning it, but if there’s anything still transmitting on Kerberos, I’ll be able to hear it.”

Keith’s eyes snap back to her. He’s quiet for a minute, and she starts to worry that she’s made a mistake. But finally, he frowns and looks back at her. “You’re bringing it out here, what, to cut down on the interference?”

She lets out the breath she’s been holding. “Yeah.”

“It’s not… a great spot,” he says slowly. “It’s visible from the highway. Sometimes people call the cops if they see you out here.”

She looks down. “Oh.”

Keith shifts uncomfortably on his heels. “I know a better place,” he says at last. “If you want.”

She considers it. Heading out into the desert with a stranger who seems to spend his weekends lurking in the middle of nowhere is arguably not a great life choice. But she wants to know what that _sound_ was, and Keith feels… weirdly trustworthy, in a way she can’t quite pin down.

And he’s someone else who lost someone on Kerberos. Someone else who knows there’s something wrong about the official report.

“All right,” she says.


	2. Chapter 2

The week keeps her busy. She’s starting to get used to the Garrison. She remembers to answer to Pidge when the instructor calls roll, catches up on most of her reading at least enough to fake her way through class, and stops worrying about using the bathroom. (The men’s rooms are universally revolting, but absolutely no one notices or cares if she uses a stall.) The guys in her dorm have given up on socializing with her, which is just as well. She hadn’t realized how alike she and Matt looked until she cut her hair. No one seems to have made the connection, but she’s not interested in tempting fate. Classes have picked up in earnest, and between her two labs, she’s stretched thin. They’re supposed to be assigned to flight teams later in the semester, and although that’s where she needs to be, it’ll be two more people she has to dodge and she’s already sure it’s going to be a problem.

Her mother must have filed a police report by now. She’s officially a missing person. She tries not to think about that too much.

She distracts herself with plans for receiver testing, trying to figure out if she needs to bring anything extra if whatever location Keith has in mind doesn’t work out. She also spends a not-insignificant amount of time trying to figure out what that _sound_ was. She’s never spent time in nature that she didn’t have to, but she’s lived by the Garrison all her life and she’s never heard anything like it. She trawls through meteorology articles and bottom-of-the-barrel internet forums, but none of the spooky desert noises she digs up seem to match. Keith had acted like it was a regular occurrence.

He’d definitely been surprised she’d heard it.

There’s maybe a lot to unpack there, and she’s not remotely qualified to do it. But it’s a weird, uncanny sound, and if she’d heard it by herself out in the middle of the desert, she’s not sure she’d think it was anything but her mind playing tricks on her either. Dehydration, or sunstroke, or just lack of sleep, maybe. If someone else heard it afterwards, she might be surprised too.

When Saturday comes around, she signs out a bike again and makes the trip down to the dusty commuter parking lot at the edge of town, her chest tight with anticipation. At first, she doesn’t see Keith, and her stomach hollows out, wondering if he’s decided not to show up. But she drives to the far end of the lot and finally spies him leaning up against an older model red and white bike, tapping his fingers on the helmet resting on the seat. Once he notices her, he straightens up and raises a hand. She lets out a breath and eases the bike forward.

He eyes her hands on the bike’s handlebars and frowns. “You okay to go on the highway?”

It strikes her that if he knows she’s Matt’s sister, he might realize she’s not supposed to have a license for at least another year. “I did fine last time,” she snaps.

He shrugs and reaches for his helmet. “It’s not far.”

He pulls the helmet on and she follows him out of the lot. There’s not much traffic this early, but Keith keeps to a suspiciously moderate pace for someone with honors scores on the fighter track, and she works up some justified irritation at the thought that he might be doing it for her benefit. Eventually, they turn off onto a lonely exit that peters out into a dirt road, and then no road at all. The landscape all looks the same to her, but Keith seems to know where he’s going, and soon she spots a structure in the distance, a dark spot up on top of a scrubby little hill. Keith makes for it, and a couple of minutes later they pull up in front of it.

It’s a rundown shack, with no sign of any other buildings to explain its presence. She can see cheap paper blinds in the windows, and a spot on the roof that’s been clumsily patched. There’s a neat row of rocks lined up on the front step, and she catches the white flash of fossil shell in the ones closest. It doesn’t look like a utility shed or an outbuilding. It looks like a place someone lives. 

Keith dismounts, and after a moment, she does too. He shifts awkwardly on his feet. “I figured maybe you could use the porch. If you need more open space, there’s kind of a hill over that way,” he jerks his thumb out to the desert, “but if you take the porch, at least you get some shade.”

She hesitates for a moment. She wants to ask what this place is, if he _lives_ here, but she can guess it probably won’t go over well. It feels a little like she’s intruding, but he’s invited her here and she can already see the heat haze starting to shimmer over the flat ground. “I’ll take the porch.”

Keith, to her surprise, cracks a shy, rusty smile. “Good choice.” He blinks and gives a slight shake of his head, as if he’s surprised himself as well.

She unpacks her gear from the saddlebags and starts setting up. Keith helps, surprising her again. She’s not sure what she’d expected - maybe for him to quietly vanish off into the desert - but he helps her carry everything over to the front of the shack and connects the cables she tells him to. When it’s done, she sits on the shaded edge of the porch and watches the first blips of calibration data come in while the receiver aligns to its new coordinates. Keith hovers behind her for a few seconds, an uneasy presence at her back, before awkwardly sitting down on the porch as well, a little ways apart from her.

“You said you didn’t think Kerberos was pilot error,” he says finally, with no preamble.

She lets out a breath. “They didn’t tell us anything until two days after the landing. Why wait if it was a crash?” She swallows. “I found the log for the first day. They were collecting samples. They had to have landed.”

There’s a quiet inhale from where Keith is sitting very still at her side. “‘Found?’” he says after a moment.

She stares hard at the calibration data, the words jammed under her tongue. It’s not a story she’s told anyone else. “I snuck into the Garrison so I could get on the network. Got caught and they threw me out.” She draws her knees up and clutches them tight to her chest. The rest comes out in a rush, halfway without her meaning to say it. “Enrolled as a cadet. Pidge. No one’s figured it out yet.”

She waits anxiously in the silence that follows, cold despite the desert heat. It’s much more than she’d planned to tell him.

“…Should I call you Pidge?” Keith says hesitantly.

It bleeds the tension right out of her, and she rests her forehead on her knees against an ugly snort of laughter. The corners of her eyes are a little wet, and she’s not sure why. “Pidge is fine.” She surreptitiously scrubs her eyes across her sleeve and the rest of it comes pouring out. “There was more on Kerberos in there. They’re hiding something. I’m going to get back in, and this time they’re not going to catch me.” She inhales and gestures at the receiver. “But I can’t just wait, so-”

Keith blinks. “Kerberos’ black box signal.” He frowns, twitches his shoulders like a chill’s run up his spine.

She blinks too, a little startled that he’s made the connection. Though maybe it makes sense - he’d been in his last year as a cadet before he’d left the Garrison. Just short of starting to fly real vehicles. “Yeah.”

He’s quiet for a minute. “If you find it, I can help you figure it out.” He glances away, thumb running restlessly back and forth over his knuckles. “I flew the sim for the landing a couple of times. Shiro snuck me in.”

“Was he your brother?” she asks, before she can stop herself.

His shoulders hunch and his face does something complicated. “No.”

She winces and stares down at the ground. “Sorry.”

After a second, his posture loosens. “It’s okay.”

She bites her lip, thinking. She could figure out a lot from a black box record herself, but someone who’s actually trained for flight, who knows what a Kerberos landing is supposed to look like, could see a lot more. “It’s. Um. It’s definitely very illegal. Not listening to the signal, but cracking the encryption. And stealing files off the Garrison network. Just so we’re clear.”

Keith snorts. “I guessed.”

“Okay.” She and her new accomplice sit there quietly for a minute while the alignment finishes. “You don’t think it was pilot error either,” she ventures.

Keith gives a small shake of his head. “No. Shiro was really good. The landing procedure’s mostly automated. There’s no atmosphere to screw you up. He wouldn’t make that kind of mistake.” His jaw sets stubbornly. “I know that-”

“It doesn’t sound stupid,” she bites out, and pauses, surprised at her own outburst. She shakes her head clear and takes a breath. “I mean, you knew him, right?”

There’s a beat of quiet and she watches as the stiff line of Keith’s back slowly slackens. “Yeah,” he says.

The receiver beeps to let her know it’s finished aligning. Keith looks on for a few minutes while she sets up the gain and filter settings for the next tuning cycle before clearing his throat.

“You, uh. Want a glass of water?”

She blinks. It’s dry and hot, and she realizes suddenly that it’s already been a couple of hours since they met up at the commuter lot. “Yeah. Thanks.”

He stands and goes to the door, digs in his pocket a minute for the key. He opens it, and she has a quick view of a tiny, dim room crowded with a futon and a low cinderblock table. She’s struck by an intense feeling of déjà vu, a sense that if she walked in after him every lump in the futon would be familiar and she’d be able to name the books piled on the floor without looking. She looks away, unnerved, and focuses on her tuning algorithm.

The door creaks open again and the porch thunks hollowly as Keith sets a mug down beside her.

“Thanks.”

He grunts an acknowledgment and sits back down in his spot. Neither of them say anything for a bit. Pidge sips her water and plugs in her next set of parameters. Keith alternately watches her and stares out into the desert. It should be uncomfortable, but somehow it isn’t. She kicks off the tuning cycle and glances over to him, the mug clasped between her hands.

“Are you going to tell me what that sound last week was?”

He doesn’t visibly shift, but something about his posture goes still and wary. The fingers of the hand she can see tap slowly on the porch’s edge. For a minute, she thinks he might not answer, but then his fingers still. “I’m not sure what it is.” He hesitates. “I’ve been calling it the Knell.”

She coughs out half a laugh. “Seriously?”

He scowls. “I had to call it something.”

“It’s just so dramatic.”

“You have anything better?”

She snorts. “No. Fair.” She kicks a leg over the edge of the porch and leans forward to rest her elbows on her knees. “Does it happen a lot out here?”

“Every few days.” He pauses and his shoulders hunch a little. “Been hearing it ever since Kerberos.”

“Huh.” She can see why he’s reluctant to admit that. 

“I’m not sure it really is a sound,” he says quietly, staring out into the desert. “I’ve heard it in town a few times. No one else seems to notice.”

She blinks and assesses that. Her thoughts go back to the way he’d put a hand to his chest, like he could feel something ringing through it. “Are you proposing that it’s a… I dunno, a-” she grimaces “- _vibe?_ ”

He winces almost imperceptibly.

She turns the thought over, thinks back to what she remembers about the Knell. There’d been an unreal quality to its length and pitch, something wrong about its echo. Or maybe its lack of echo, she realizes with a start. Maybe it only reads as a sound because that’s the closest thing her brain can supply. She shivers, but a thrill of excitement runs up her spine.

“Maybe you’re right,” she says. “It’s definitely not just you hearing it, though. Or feeling it, I guess.”

He makes an indistinct humming noise, shoulders relaxing. She thinks that’s the end of it, but he surprises her. “There’s a direction to it,” he offers, and waves a hand towards the horizon. “It’s coming from somewhere over there.”

“Really?” She squints, but it looks exactly like every other piece of the horizon.

“I’ve been trying to find it.”

“Can I help?” The words jump out without her meaning them to.

His eyes dart over to her. After a second, he shrugs and his lips twitch. “Sure. You’re stuck hearing it too.”

It belatedly strikes her that she’s just committed them to meeting up again, but she finds she doesn’t really mind. “Thanks,” she says after a minute. “For letting me come out here.”

Keith’s face goes blank and startled before settling into determined lines. When he speaks, his voice is quiet and rough. “I want to know what happened to Kerberos. What happened to Shiro. Come out here whenever you like.”

She bites her lip for a second, and then sticks her hand out. “Partners?”

Keith stares at it a moment. His expression eases and his hand briefly clasps hers. “Yeah.”


	3. Chapter 3

They quickly settle into a routine. On Saturdays and Sundays, Pidge meets Keith at the commuter lot early in the morning and follows him out to the shack. They set up the equipment and she stays until nightfall, working on her homework assignments in between honing the receiver’s alignment routine and filtering. The alignment is the hard part - she doesn’t have an astronomical radio dish at her disposal, and there’s nothing to tell her when she’s pointed at the right part of the sky. All she can do is test her tracking routines on well-known radio signals (low Earth orbit satellites and the lunar relays are some of her first targets), and hope that her trajectory calculations for Kerberos are right. It’s boring, finicky work, but each pass makes it a little more accurate, a little more stable. 

At first, Keith alternates between loitering curiously on the porch and abrupt excursions to work on his bike or circle out into the nearby desert, like he doesn’t know what to do with her presence. By the end of the second weekend, though, he claims a spot a little ways away from her and parks himself there for most of the day. Sometimes he brings out an ancient toolbox and something to work on. It’s mostly small engines - old lawnmower motors, washing machine pumps clogged with socks, cleaning droids with their contacts covered in dog hair. He takes them apart and cleans their pieces, swaps parts until they work again. Other times, he covers the pages of a cheap notebook with rambling geometric designs. During the midday hours he dozes slumped up against one of the porch’s supports, arms crossed and eyes slitted closed against the sun while she eats her lunch.

Normally, she wouldn’t appreciate the company. She doesn’t like people hovering over her while she works. But Keith’s presence is weirdly comfortable. There’s no expectation that she devote her attention to him - they’re just two people sharing space while they work. It takes a lot of the pressure off, and she finds herself talking to him while she works sometimes. At first it’s just griping about the latest problem with the alignment and the troubles she’s going through to fix it. But little by little, other things start to slip in. The lab she’s having to redo because some kid in her electronics section didn’t read the component power ratings and started a fire. The 8AM operations course that nobody - including the instructor - is awake for. The dumb internet slapfight she’s having with one of the weird desert sounds conspiracy theorists. It’s not like her to talk so much to someone she doesn’t know well, and part of her is a little freaked out, but she can’t seem to stop. She hasn’t really talked to anyone in weeks, not since she left home, and Keith is the only person on the planet who knows what she’s doing at the Garrison.

It hits her right between the eyes late one Sunday, surprised by a dull pang in her chest as she packs up to head back to the Garrison. She’s _lonely_. Keith notices her pause and straightens up from helping her pack the saddlebags.

He frowns. “Everything okay?”

She shakes her head. “Yeah. Sorry.”

He watches her seriously for a second, eyes searching her face like he’s about to say something, before he shifts uncomfortably and turns back to loading the equipment. She bites her lip and thinks maybe he’s lonely too.

After that, she starts making a conscious effort to ask him questions. She’s pretty bad at it, but Keith is pretty bad at answering so it evens out. She learns that the used appliance shop at the corner of 3rd and South pays cash for the small engine repairs he does. The fossils on the step come from a roadcut a few miles south that he visits sometimes. He’s been watching a family of coyotes from a distance for the last month and he’s named all the snakes that sun themselves on the rocks in back of the shack.

She’s certain that he lives in the shack by now, but he never says it, and she doesn’t ask. He never mentions other people.

Gradually, he begins to ask her questions and offer occasional comments. He wants to know whether Instructor Warner is teaching Introductory Navigation again. He’s genuinely curious about what she’s doing with the receiver, and never seems bored or put off by her explanations, even if she has to explain the jargon to him. His opinion on her conspiracy theorist internet nemesis is so bluntly devastating that she messages it to him on the spot and they wind up wasting the next hour in a satisfyingly petty teardown of conspiracy theories at large. 

(They probably count as conspiracy theorists themselves now, but neither is willing to cross that bridge.)

The trips out to the shack quickly become the bright spot in her routine. During the week, she finds herself sometimes turning to say something to Keith, always a little startled not to see him there. It’s not too surprising after she thinks about it - she’s not really talking with anyone else these days. The desert even starts bleeding into her subconscious. Sometimes she’ll catch a glimpse of the shack on the horizon or find herself gunning the bike down the highway towards the exit in the middle of her usual muddled, hectic dreams. It always leaves her feeling a little strange and disconnected when she wakes, but it’s a relief from the dismal dream loop of classes and her mother and Kerberos.

Today, she’s got the receiver locked on what she thinks is one of the old Mars orbiters. It’s the longest the alignment has held so far, and she’s holding her breath watching the data tick in, hoping it keeps pace with the Earth’s rotation this time. Keith’s leaning a shoulder against one of the porch supports, watching her out the side of his eye, his latest repair project halfway put together next to him. It’s getting to be the time of day when he shuts down. The decisive click of her final entry draws his attention.

“Still holding?” he asks.

“So far so good.” She sits back down and stretches her hands out, knuckles cracking. “Just gotta wait.”

He starts to say something, and then freezes in place. A heartbeat later, the hair goes up on the back of her neck and she hears it too. The Knell’s long, uncanny roar rings through her bones like thunder. She’s heard it - or its echo - occasionally at the Garrison, muffled and half-imagined, but up close it goes through her like a shock of ice down her spine. She forgets to breathe for a second.

Keith’s up on his feet in an flash and she scrambles to follow suit. He darts into the shack and comes out with something clutched in his hand. He shoves it into a pocket and pauses a moment at the door, hand hovering over his chest. He shifts on his heels, orienting himself eastwards like there’s a line hooked under his sternum tugging him around. Without thinking about it, she finds herself rotating to face the same direction. She frowns and puts a hand to her own chest. For a second, she’s almost convinced she can feel something pulling at her, but it’s gone in an instant.

Keith rocks on his feet like he’s hit a physical stop, and then turns himself at a forty-five degree angle and hops off the porch. He catches her eye as he does it, and she knows he’s going to chase after it. Without needing an invitation, Pidge follows.

They tramp out into the desert until the shack is just a blip on the horizon behind them. The Knell has faded by now, but Keith seems to know where he’s headed, and eventually they arrive at a tower of flat, craggy rocks. Keith does something disgustingly athletic that has him up and over its lowest ledge like it’s nothing. _Show-off_ , she thinks, scowling up at him.

Keith pauses and blinks down at her. “Sorry,” he says awkwardly, before going down on his belly to dangle a hand over the edge. “Here.”

She shoots him a dirty look, but jumps a little to catch at his fingers. His hand clamps over hers and she braces her feet on the rock, and between them, she clambers up too. The rest of the climb is easier, and they make it to the top in short order. From up here, the desert seems to stretch out endlessly, heat shimmer bleeding the ground out into the sky. Keith turns in a slow circle before coming to a dead halt facing northeast. His hand is raised over his chest again.

She eyes him curiously. “Are you still hearing it?” 

He starts a little and yanks his hand down. “Don’t really hear it,” he says after a moment. “Can still feel something, though.”

“Huh.” She bites her lip thoughtfully. 

Keith steadfastly avoids her eyes, staring out at the horizon. After a second, he digs in his pocket and draws out a flat, rectangular shape, holding it out straight and level in front of him. She leans over and sees that it’s a cheap analog compass, the hard plastic scuffed and marked with sharpie at the edges. He jerks his head over towards a point to their left. “Took a heading from over there last time.”

She squints into the distance and can make out another rise in the landscape. “So you can triangulate it? That’s smart.”

He ducks his head down to look at the compass, hair falling over his eyes. “Too far away to follow it directly.”

She hums and pulls out her phone. “Here,” she says. “What’s your heading?”

“Sixty-seven degrees.”

She notes it down and frowns. “We should get-”

“-multiple readings. I know.” He shakes his head and blinks. She raises an eyebrow at him, and after a second he shrugs. “Must have learned something from watching you spend all that time realigning.”

She snorts. “Yeah, all right. Rub it in, why don’t you.” She thinks a minute. “If we really want to do it right, we should take them blind, so we know you’re not subconsciously picking up on visual landmarks.” She hesitates. “Uh. You could close your eyes and I could spin you around a few times?”

Her stomach clenches almost as soon as the words leave her mouth. What if she spins him around and he winds up pointing in a different direction every time? What if they’ve been fooling themselves, following a sound that doesn’t really exist? What if Keith has just been out here too long, going crazy by himself in the desert?

The feeling subsides almost as quickly as it came, and she shakes off a sense of unease. It’s not like her to second-guess herself. Keith draws a breath next to her and she wonders if his thoughts are running along similar lines. “Okay,” he says.

She eyes him, still unsettled. “We’re both hearing it, right? There’s got to be something out there.” She’s not sure which of them she’s trying to convince.

“Let’s just get it over with.”

A couple of minutes later, she’s standing on top of a rock facing Keith.

“This feels stupid,” he grumbles.

“Quit whining,” she tells him. “Ready?”

He rolls his eyes and then squeezes them shut. “Ready.”

She brings her hands gingerly down on his shoulders. He spooks a bit at the touch, but lets her spin him around for close to a minute, until he wobbles a little in his tracks.

“Okay, go!”

Slowly, he drifts to a halt, eyes still shut, compass held in front of him. She leans over and whistles. “Sixty-eight degrees.” She notes it down in her phone.

They repeat the experiment a few more times. Each time, Keith comes within a degree or two of his sixty-seven degree heading. “Well, you’re certainly locked onto something,” she tells him, and pretends not to notice the relieved breath he lets out.

They trek back to the shack and she settles back down on the porch to check the receiver’s progress. Keith disappears inside and comes back out clutching an ancient corkboard, a spool of twine, and a mason jar full of mismatched pushpins. He sits down in his usual spot and she cranes her head over to look. Pinned to the board is a yellowing topographical map. A pair of pushpins anchors a strand of twine stretching across the geography like a ray of light.

She makes a delighted gasp. “Is that-”

Keith gives her a sour look. “It is not.”

“It _is_.”

_“No.”_

“I know a conspiracy board when I see one.”

Keith scoffs and sticks another pin into the board, a little ways away from the first. “That’s where we just were.” He cuts a length of twine with the knife he keeps on his belt and loops it around the pin. He lays the map flat on the porch and painstakingly lines up its north with the compass. Carefully, he pins the twine stretching out across the map at the sixty-five degree mark, the minimum of the headings they’ve taken. He cuts another length of twine and repeats the process at their maximum of sixty-eight degrees. Together, they cut a narrow arc stretching out through the desert pointing away from the city. The previous string intersects it at an obtuse angle. Keith scowls at it and flicks at its pin. “Going to have to redo that one and get a range.”

He stares down at the map for another few seconds. “Thanks. For the range idea.” He pauses, grimaces. “And for spinning me around.”

She grins. “Anytime.” Keith huffs, but there’s no bite to it.

Silence settles down on them while Pidge logs the last data run and punches in a new set of calibration constants. Keith picks up the corkboard and disappears back into the shack with it. When he comes out again, he takes up his previous place leaning against a support, his eyes starting to drift closed in the midday light. Pidge glances at the angle of the sun slanting across the porch and digs in her backpack for her lunchbox. The icepack inside is mostly liquid by now, but the foil-wrapped sandwiches are still thankfully cool. She takes the one closest and then hesitates a second before picking up the other and shoving it in Keith’s direction.

“Here. Hope you like turkey.”

He rouses and stares down at it like he’s never seen a sandwich before. “What?”

“Just take it. It’s weird eating by myself.”

He eyes her for a long moment before his mouth snaps shut and he cautiously reaches out for it. Carefully, he unwraps it and opens it up to begin methodically picking out all the tomatoes and cheese. He catches her eye and flushes. “Can’t eat tomatoes. Or dairy.”

“That sucks,” she pronounces. “What can you eat? Besides turkey and bread.”

He squints. “Bell peppers…?”

She mentally marks that down as a ‘maybe’. Given that she hasn’t actually seen him eat anything up until now, maybe she shouldn’t be surprised. “Okay. I’ll get you something with those next time. I’ll grab a menu so you can pick what you want.”

He’s quiet for a second. “I’ll pay you back.”

She waves a hand. “It’s fine.” She’s not sure what he makes under the table from his repairs, but it can’t be much. She’s not completely sure he’s not just squatting out here. She’s not exactly rolling in cash either, but buying deli sandwiches is far from the worst thing she’s done with her college fund at this point.

Keith’s jaw sets mulishly. “I’m not a charity case.”

She scowls. “It’s not-” Something pricks at her hindbrain, a familiar nettling sting of hurt and stubborn independence. She bites back the words and tries again. “Look, you’re letting me set up out here. I owe you.” She blows out a breath. “You could have just kicked me out or blown my cover if you wanted. The least I can do is bring lunch.”

His shoulders tighten, and he glances away. “I wouldn’t do that.” A long moment passes before some of the tension finally drains out of his spine. “Thanks,” he says at last.

“Mmph,” she replies through a mouthful of sandwich. Out of the corner of her eye, she watches him sigh and finally relax into a boneless lean against the porch support.

They eat quietly for a while and Pidge finds her thoughts wandering back to the Knell. She’s more and more convinced that Keith is right, that it isn’t really a sound. In the muddle of their hurried exit from the porch, she distinctly remembers the creak of the shack door and the hollow thunk of their footsteps on the floorboards, clear despite the Knell’s apparent volume. It doesn’t echo the way it should against the rocks, and for all that it feels like it has a pitch, she can’t find it, humming up and down a scale under her breath. And there’s something different about the way Keith experiences it from the way she does - he’d followed whatever direction it gave him out into the desert long after she’d stopped hearing it. She thinks about that brief phantom tug under her breastbone and frowns thoughtfully.

“I can feel it all the time,” Keith says abruptly into the silence. His eyes are pinned straight out on the horizon line.

She starts at the interruption and a chill runs up her spine. “Spooky,” she mutters to herself. 

Keith hauls himself upright and seems to shake himself out of his half-daze. “The Knell, I mean.”

She firmly quashes the sense of weirdness prickling at her. They just spent most of an hour chasing the Knell down. It’s not surprising they’re both still thinking about it. “‘All the time?’” she asks carefully.

A couple of seconds pass before he replies. “Yeah. Stronger when you can actually hear it.” He frowns, fingers tapping restlessly on the floorboards. “Or, I don’t know. Not stronger, exactly. Clearer. More distinct.”

“I think I felt it too for a second. Like a pull in your chest, right?” 

“Exactly.” He lets out a breath.

She can’t stop an electric thrill of excitement going through her. She’s never really doubted that the Knell’s real, but actually following it brings it starkly into focus. There’s something out there in the desert, somewhere in that arc of land on Keith’s map. “What do you think it is?” she asks.

“Up until you heard it, I thought it was just me,” he replies bluntly.

“Definitely not just you.” She shakes her head. “I mean, what _is_ it? Why's it sitting out here putting out... vibes, or brainwaves, or whatever it is? What's it doing out here? What does it want?”

Keith hesitates and then shifts uncomfortably. “I always thought it sounded lonely.”

_Lonely._ It stops her short. There is something lonely about the Knell and the way it saturates the space, drowning everything else out. Nothing else seems real around it. It boils the world down to just her and Keith, looking for the footprints of people who are never coming back, following a sound that no one else can hear. “I guess it does,” she says after a second. “Maybe it just wants company.” She breathes out and pushes her glasses up on her nose, shoves the ache back down. “Or maybe,” she says firmly and with a certain degree of bloodthirsty satisfaction, “it’s just trying to lure us in. Like an anglerfish.”

Keith thinks about that for a few seconds. Then he casts her a sly look out the side of his eye. “Spoken like a true conspiracy theorist.”

She sputters and throws her sandwich wrapper at him.


	4. Chapter 4

“You know the guy who built the first parabolic radio telescope spent a whole summer building it by himself in his backyard?” Pidge says out into the desert. “I think about that guy a lot.”

After a moment, Keith replies from where he’s slouched in the sun. “If you want to build a parabolic reflector out here, no one’s stopping you.” The words are flat, but she can feel the dry humor lurking underneath them.

“It would probably help,” she gripes.

There’s a quiet rustle of fabric from his side of the porch. “Do you-”

“No. Not really,” she sighs. A dish probably _would_ help, but she doesn’t actually want to personally build one.

So far, the day is not going well. Pidge is already tired thanks to procrastination and another set of weird dreams, and now that she’s out here, the receiver - which should be working - isn’t. The tracking routine that worked just fine for the Mars orbiters drifts, slowly but measurably, from the trajectory of the Europa research station she’s trying to shadow.

“I don’t get it. It should be getting something,” she mutters, watching the empty spectrogram display.

Keith blinks over to where she’s sprawled in front of her computer. “Bad-” he starts to suggest.

“Ugh.” He’s probably right - ninety percent of problems with the receiver are alignment problems - but she doesn’t want to have to run the calibration again. She flops back on the porch, arm flung over her face, and groans. It’s way too hot for this. She can feel the flush in her cheeks and her shirt is a gross, sweaty mess clinging damply to her back.

There’s a scraping sound as Keith slides the jug of water towards her. He doesn’t bother to open his eyes to do it, lazily draped against the porch beam. “You’d be less hot if you hydrated better.”

“Easy for you to say.” Keith tolerates the heat better than she does, somehow still apparently comfortable in his stupid bike gloves and black clothing. She sits up and pours into her cup anyways. She considers the receiver some more. It could be that she screwed up the trajectory calculations. Or it could be a bad calibration. Or it could be something mechanical. Or it could be something subtly off with the alignment routine itself. None of those are attractive troubleshooting options. She makes a face. “I don’t want to think about this right now. Break?”

After a moment, she hears Keith pry himself upright. “Yeah, all right.”

She reaches into her bag for the lunchbox. From Keith’s end of the porch, there’s a quiet creak of floorboards. Something twinges at her - a sudden, muted sense of uncertainty - and she looks over to see him standing stiffly at the door.

He jerks his head towards the shack. “You want to go inside?”

She blinks. She’s assumed the shack’s interior is strictly off-limits. “Sure. If you’re offering,” she says cautiously.

He nods sharply and pries open the door. “It’s, uh. It’s not much. Sit wherever you want.”

It’s still blisteringly hot inside, but it’s at least consistently shaded, and there’s a crossbreeze from the open windows. It’s just as tiny and cramped as it looks from what she’s spied through the open door, but it feels familiar by now. She gets another whiff of that déjà vu she had the first time she saw the interior, and shakes her head to dispel it. She drops the lunchbox on the table and makes a beeline for the far side of the futon ( _the good side of the futon,_ that déjà vu whispers). With a groan, she plops herself down. The springs make an ominous creaking noise, but it’s comfortable enough.

Keith eyes her and sighs before leaning over to reach into the gap between the back of the futon and the wall. He comes up with a decrepit box fan, plastic casing stained yellow with age.

She stares. “You ass. You’ve had a fan all this time?”

He narrows his eyes and lifts the fan into the air. “It’s-”

“I don’t care if it’s battery-powered. I will bring my own batteries and swap them in every single time if you want.”

He snorts. “Just as long as I don’t have to keep buying them to support your ventilation habit.”

_“Ventilation habit,”_ she marvels.

He stoically ignores her and sets the fan down on the table. Pidge sighs as he flicks it on and the breeze blows her sticky bangs off her forehead. “I can’t believe you don’t use this thing.”

“I use it sometimes,” he says defensively. “When I’m trying to sleep.” Which is as good as a confession that he’s living here. He seems to realize that a second afterwards, and stiffens.

It’s not any kind of surprise to her at this point. “Just let me enjoy my _ventilation habit_ in peace,” she tells him, and hands him his sandwich.

After a second, he exhales a low, drawn-out _haah_ noise and sinks down onto the other side of the couch. Things are briefly quiet while they eat (turkey club for her, the world’s most boring roast beef for him). From where they’re sitting, they’ve got a front-and-center view of the corkboard where it leans against the opposite wall.

The webbing of twine crisscrossing it has grown over the last several weeks. Keith’s headings mark out a lopsided pentagram on the map, their intersection enclosing a tract that lies mostly in a shallow canyon cutting through higher, flatter land. According to Keith, it’s about a half-square mile of ground. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but they’re not having much luck narrowing the Knell’s location down any further.

She’s made a few trips out there with him. It’s a weird part of the desert, rocks all jumbled together in uneven, imposing formations concealing a thousand hidden crevices and byways. Whatever sense Keith’s following can’t seem to hone in on anything more specific and they’re stuck aimlessly wandering, looking for something out of place.

_“It’s not that it’s gone,”_ he’d explained, hands opening and closing at his sides. _“It’s too close now. Like we’re right in the middle of it.”_

She still doesn’t get the constant sense of the Knell that he does, but she does catch echoes of it when they make the trip, and sort of gets what he means. In that part of the desert, it feels less like a pull in her chest and more like a beating, omnidirectional pressure. They have to be right on top of it. Whatever it is. Their slow progress frustrates her, but she can tell it eats at Keith more. He makes trips out there during the week, and the corkboard is dotted with index cards annotated in his spiky handwriting. Once or twice, he’s sent her photos during the early morning or late evening - surreal, twilit parts of the landscape that seem to make the Knell ring louder. None of them have lead anywhere so far.

Keith’s thoughts must be running along the same lines as hers. He puts down his sandwich and digs in his pocket for his phone. He opens something up on it before setting it down on the table. “Here, look at this.”

She leans forward to inspect it. The screen shows a photo of a rock face in dim lighting, washed out in the camera’s flash. At first, it looks nondescript, but she peers closer and after a moment, can make out faint marks in the surface. People, she realizes after a second. People, lined up in a row in front of a large animal figure. It looks like a lion, but that doesn’t make any sense. Behind the lion is something she can’t quite make out, a stylized circular shape, its edges carved in painstaking detail.

“Whoa,” she breathes. “Where…?”

“That gully we saw last time. If you follow it further in, there’s a bunch of them.”

“Can I…?” she gestures at the phone.

He hesitates a second and then shrugs. “Go ahead. It was getting dark so I didn’t wind up getting a lot.”

She picks up the phone and scrolls through the next few images, lingering on one which shows the circular design close up. She squints, but still can’t make anything of the marks on its edges. “These are incredible.”

Keith crosses his arms and leans back on the couch. “I went into town and looked it up. There aren’t supposed to be any petroglyphs around here. At least…” he hesitates.

_At least not any that are public knowledge,_ she completes the thought. She looks up, suddenly uneasy that they’re trespassing. “You think-” 

He frowns, fingers tapping restlessly at his elbows. She gets a sudden memory of the Knell’s territory, the way it feels lost and empty, like the Knell’s saturated it so deeply that it’s driven everything else out. “I don’t think so,” he says slowly. “I don’t think any other people have been down there in a long time.”

She glances over to him, but he shrugs and shifts in the way he does when he’s uncomfortable, and she lets it lie. Instead she scrolls back to the first picture, tilting the phone out of the glare of the window to see it better. “If that’s really a lion, it must be from before they went extinct in North America.”

“Ten-thousand years ago, give or take,” he murmurs.

“Nerd.” He raises an eyebrow at her, but doesn’t rise to the bait. She turns her attention back to the photos and frowns. “They must have been important to someone once. Wonder what they mean.”

Keith is quiet for a disconcertingly long time and a prickle of unease runs up her spine. “There’s something…” He shakes his head. She looks over sharply. “I followed them in a little further. They get weird.”

She frowns and lays the phone down the on table. “‘Weird?’”

“The lion shows up a lot more. There’s a-” He pauses, and she’s blindsided by a shockingly vivid mental image of a towering, bulky figure. It comes out of nowhere, and she freezes in place, halfway stunned. It’s so clear she can count the lines making it up. Under her fingertips, there’s a faint, incongruous texture of smooth rock. “-another person, I guess,” Keith’s voice continues distantly. “Bigger than the others, wearing some kind of armor-”

“-Holding a sword?” she blurts out dazedly, the sharp lines of the image hanging behind her eyes. 

Something jolts in the back of her brain and Keith goes absolutely still. “I didn’t take a photo of that,” he says after a long moment.

“I know.” She swallows. Somehow she does know. She’d scrolled through four pictures on his phone and stopped, disappointed that there weren’t more. But how had she known that? A chill goes through her. It’s just a coincidence. Just a weird confluence of brain jank and circumstance.

But there’s a low, static-y buzz in some back corner of her mind, a crawling, prickling tension running through her upper back. Next to her, Keith crosses his arms tight over his chest. His collar pulls taut against his neck and shoulders and the feeling lessens. The hair goes up on the back of her neck.

She finds her thoughts racing back to all the times she’s finished one of Keith’s sentences or he’s finished one of hers. The habit they’ve fallen into of not finishing sentences at all. All the times they’ve both abruptly jumped to some new topic without the need for a segue or explanation, all the weird little flashes of misplaced feeling. The strange, out of place moments during the week where she feels like Keith is sitting right next to her and the way her dreams keep wandering out to the desert. 

They’re just picking up on subliminal cues, that’s all. It’s just a shared obsession with Kerberos and the Knell.

That back corner of her mind is tight as a bowstring, spiky with tension. Keith is still, his lips pressed into a thin line, fingers gripping the points of his elbows. Her finger joints ache a little.

What if it’s _not_ just subliminal awareness?

She bites her lip and thinks of a memory, doesn’t let herself second-guess it. A screwdriver in her hand, popping the frames of Matt’s glasses open, the new plastic lenses in a box at her elbow. “If I told you my glasses prescription is-”

“-You’d be lying,” Keith says, his face sheet-white. “You don’t need glasses.” He takes a breath. “I keep the spare key-”

There’s a brief impression of the porch from the side, and the ghostly feeling of wooden slats under her fingers. She points numbly. “-Under the porch floorboards somewhere over there.”

A choking silence descends on them. The nausea and the too-fast feeling in her brain are familiar. She’s pretty sure the ratcheting tension in her spine and the overwhelming urge to open and close her fists are coming from Keith.

“Fuck,” Keith says heavily.

“Yeah,” she echoes dazedly. “I thought we were just. I don’t know. Picking up on things subconsciously,” she finishes lamely. 

“I thought I was back to hearing things,” Keith mutters, and they both wince. A hot burst of shame blooms in the back of her head. It mutes itself abruptly, and Keith pushes himself stiffly into the couch’s furthest corner, avoiding her eyes.

She breathes out. “So what now? Are we… psychic or something?”

“Dunno,” he says. A minute goes by, and he shifts in place, still looking at the corner of the room. “I’ve had hunches before. Weird feelings. Nothing like this.”

“Me neither,” she says. And she’s never even had the hunches and weird feelings. She tries to clamp down on that thought as soon as it forms, isn’t sure whether she succeeds. She feels like she’s walking on glass, hyperaware of her own thoughts and that bright, foreign spot at the back of her mind.

Something twists through it, lightning-quick and indistinct. If she hadn’t been paying such close attention, if she hadn’t already been watching, she might have dismissed it as just the edge of an unfinished thought, some half-remembered dream trying to surface. “What if it’s the Knell?” Keith says slowly. She looks over to him and he shrugs stiffly. “We know it’s not really a sound. Neither one of us had this happen before we heard it.”

She grimaces. She’s been trying to avoid thinking of the Knell in supernatural terms, but it’s not a stretch to think that where there are two psychic phenomena, they’re probably connected. Still. “You were hearing it for a long time before I was, though. And you weren’t, uh, having this problem back then.” She hesitates. “Right?”

He gives a hard shake of his head. “No. But maybe it only works with people who can hear it.”

She frowns. “Should we stop trying to find it?” she says reluctantly.

There’s a violent ripple through whatever it is stretching between them. “No,” Keith says decisively. “It just gets louder if you ignore it.” She shoots him an alarmed look, and he grimaces. “It did for me, anyway.”

She purses her lips. “It didn’t start out like this, right? It’s definitely gotten stronger over time?”

“Yeah.”

Silence falls over them. That back corner of her brain feels full of sharp angles turning restlessly over themselves. Like the prick and jab of holding a handful of thumbtacks. Now that she consciously knows it’s there, she can’t help but prod at it, like tonguing a loose tooth. She wonders what Keith’s getting from her on his end, and a shudder goes through her. If they’re so casually picking this stuff up now, how much are they going to pick up if it keeps getting stronger? What if they start to sense concrete thoughts too, and not just vague feelings and impressions? Will they wind up as unwilling audiences to each other’s inner lives, without any privacy of their own? She swallows. “No offense, but-”

“We should probably stop meeting up,” Keith interjects in a rush.

“Yeah,” she breathes out heavily, relieved. “If it didn’t start until we started meeting, maybe if we just stay apart and don’t touch it, it’ll go away.”

Keith shakes his head. “Worth a try. It’s uh. It’s not that I don’t want to help, I just-” he stutters to a halt, and she gets a sense of wariness, mixed with an awful, crawling feeling of invasion. “I can’t-”

She surprises herself with a humorless bark of laughter, shoulders up around her ears. “Yeah, I don’t want you hearing all my innermost thoughts either.” 

Keith snorts, and a little of the tension leaves his spine. They’re both quiet for a few minutes. “Are you going to keep looking for the Knell?” she asks.

“Yeah.” He leans forward, elbows resting on his knees. “If we can find it, maybe we can figure out what this-” he gestures between them “-is.”

_Maybe we can figure out how to put a stop to it,_ goes unsaid. She nods slowly. “You’ll message me, right? If you find it?”

There’s a flicker of something, there and gone again, and he blinks. “Yeah. Of course.” He looks over sideways at her and frowns. “What about you? Are you going to be able to keep working on the receiver?”

She considers it, and nods. “Yeah. The filtering works and the rest of it’s mostly stable. I just have to find a place to set up.”

“You’ll tell me if you find something?”

“Of course,” she echoes.

They sit there awkwardly for a few seconds, and then she gets to her feet. “I guess I’d better pack up.”

Keith gets up as well and they stow the equipment in silence. She does her best to keep her thoughts focused away from that awareness in the back of her mind. When they’re done, Keith hovers next to her in front of the bike, both of them at a loss. At last, she takes a slow breath and frowns up at him. “Hey. Be careful, okay?” 

He blinks and something in his expression loosens. “You too.”

She snorts. “I’m just going to be writing code and spending a lot of time waiting for data. You’re the one chasing after psychic noises.” She eyes him for a second, and then screws up her courage and pulls him into a hug. Keith goes stiff and the background noise of his thoughts freezes. After a second, very carefully, he hugs her back. For an instant, she’s a different person, hugging Matt the day before the launch. Keith’s breath hitches, but it’s gone as quickly as it came. “I’m going to miss you,” she mumbles.

“Same,” he says quietly after a moment, somewhere over her shoulder.

They separate and she gets on the bike. The engine turns over and she makes for the highway. Keith is a thin, lonely figure in her mirror, silhouetted against the desert glare, getting smaller and smaller until he’s indistinguishable from the landscape.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first guy to build a parabolic radio telescope was Grote Reber, who built a thirty-foot diameter telescope in his backyard, by himself, over the course of a summer, without any outside funding or support. The telescope is wild, and absolutely worth looking up.


	5. Chapter 5

When her alarm wakes Pidge for nine the next day, she spends a few seconds staring aghast at the time display before lurching out of bed and crashing into her closet. She’s got her shirt halfway pulled over her head before she remembers she’s not meeting up with Keith anymore, due to psychic bullshit. Slowly, she pulls the shirt the rest of the way down and sinks onto her bunk. 

The day before feels hazy, not quite real. For a moment she wavers. Maybe it was just a weird dream or a touch of heatstroke. Maybe she and Keith just panicked themselves over a little dehydration and a series of mundane coincidences. She hesitates a long moment, and then bites at her lip and pokes tentatively at that back corner of her mind. Almost immediately, a phantom sun blazes along her neck and shoulders and she feels the grit of soil under boots she isn’t wearing. There’s a sharp jolt of alertness and a little genuine fear. She reels back at the same time Keith does and she’s alone in her dorm again, heart pounding. 

Definitely real.

She just sits there for a minute, feeling twitchy and creeped out. Whatever that had been had been totally different in character from the passive background awareness she’d recognized the day before. Is it because she’s conscious of the connection now and paying more attention? Because Keith’s conscious of it and paying more attention? Is is because she prodded at it deliberately? Is it going to keep doing that? She worries at it for a while, but there aren’t any answers, just more questions and anxiety, so at last she blows out her breath and gets up, doing her best to firmly put it out of her mind. There’s not much she can do about it, and if she’s not headed out to the shack, she should probably shower.

By the time she’s showered and eaten, it’s almost ten o’clock. She dithers uselessly in her room for a bit, uncomfortably at loose ends, before deciding that since she’s not going to meet up with Keith anymore, she might as well get a head start on recalibrating the receiver for the Garrison’s coordinates. She still has to figure out what went wrong with the alignment yesterday anyways, and she could use the distraction.

It takes a little bit of searching to find a good place. She wants somewhere with a clear view of the sky where she can work uninterrupted without any other cadets or staff tripping over her. It’s kind of a tall order at the Garrison, even on a weekend. But eventually, she finds an unlocked rooftop access in the engineering department on the other side of the building from the labs. She hauls her equipment up and gets a calibration cycle started before sinking down into the paltry shadow of an AC unit. She grimaces and wipes the sweat off her forehead. The engineering building roof will work, but it kind of sucks. Somehow, the sun bouncing off the concrete makes it even hotter than the shack’s porch, and she thinks wistfully of the shadow under the eaves and the smooth, worn planks.

And that’s all it takes. It’s nothing more than a flicker of hazy, half-awake boredom in the back of her head and the by-now-familiar sense that if she glanced over to her right, she’d find Keith stretched out next to her. She and Keith both jerk back from the contact and she focuses ferociously on the rough feeling of concrete under her fingertips until she’s sure it’s gone. A minute goes by and she sighs and draws up her knees to rest her chin on them.

“How did we miss that?”

The question is mostly rhetorical. She’s been catching those glimpses for weeks now, and she assumes Keith has too. She can’t even pinpoint when they started. They hadn’t seemed like anything sinister, and it had been easy to think about them as stress or distraction or just boredom. After a while they just kind of blended into the background. Now, she finds herself thinking she should have paid more attention. Telepathy is a pretty big leap to make, but it’s a little frightening how easily she’d accepted those glitches in awareness as normal. And now she’s broiling up here on the rooftop of the engineering building, and Keith is out in his falling-apart shack, and they’re stuck there until who knows when. Until the psychic wiretap they have on each other wears off. Whenever that happens.

“This sucks,” she mutters. 

The receiver beeps out the end of its calibration cycle, and with a sigh she refocuses and unfolds herself to start debugging the alignment.

* * *

She spends most of the rest of the day on the rooftop anxiously monitoring for that sense of Keith’s presence in between tweaks to the receiver’s alignment routine. She lapses into the connection a few more times over the course of the afternoon, picking up odd flashes of the light and quiet of the desert and a breath of distant wariness and unease that don’t belong to her. Each time, she and Keith both yank themselves away from it like they’re touching a hot radiator. By the time she packs up the receiver for the night, though, the reflex to pull away from the connection is becoming so routine that the sheer repetition of it has her a little less on edge. It helps that Keith is obviously just as freaked out as she is. Despite that, the constant vigilance is an exhausting, nerve-wracking experience, like the mental equivalent of holding in a sneeze while trying to pour a glass of water. By the next day, she’s looking forward to the distraction of classes.

And the classes do help, somewhat. She makes an effort to actually pay attention to the lectures, something that she only does about half the time normally. She usually figures things out from the problem sets, unless the material is really interesting. But today she focuses on what the instructors are saying and does her best not to let her thoughts wander. It sort of works, in that the flashes of Keith’s presence are a lot more obvious when she’s trying to think about Bode plots. It doesn’t work in that they don’t stop happening. 

It does mean she’s actually paying attention for a change in Operations class, which is normally flight procedure and necessary-but-boring FAA rules and regulations.

“All right, listen up.” The instructor raps on her desk and the hall goes quiet. “As you know, you’re being assigned flight teams at the end of the semester. That means labs will run a little differently from here on out. Lab will take place in the sim hall-”

A murmur goes through the room, and the instructor knocks on her desk again, the corner of her mouth twitching up briefly before settling into a thin straight line. “Settle down, cadets. You _will_ be using the simulators for this. You’ll be working with students in the piloting and engineering tracks. The objective is to get you familiar with the sim stations prior to your permanent team assignments, so remember that your lab partners are not necessarily your final teammates. Don’t get attached. Any questions?”

A smattering of hands goes up around the room, and something twists gently in Pidge’s chest. Matt had talked non-stop about the simulator for a week the first time he’d been in one. She’d been all of seven years old and he’d been more than happy to fill her head with everything he knew about spaceflight. He’d been so excited when he’d been selected for Kerberos. He’d rubbed her nose in it for months that he was going all the way out to the Kuiper belt, promised to sneak her back contraband unofficial pictures of the edge of the solar system. Even her dad, who’d already been to the moon and Mars, had been quietly thrilled at the mission. Despite the fact that neither of them are here to see it, something in her still lights up at the thought of traveling to space, leaving Earth behind her, even if it’s just a simulation for now.

There’s a catch in the back of her brain at that thought, and something tangled and aching punches through her gut so fast she barely feels it before Keith wrestles it back in and kills the connection.

She freezes in place and lets out a painful breath and hopes that the link between them dies off sooner rather than later.

* * *

Unfortunately, the link shows no signs of dying off as the week progresses. Now that she knows it’s there, she’s constantly aware of it. It’s getting easier to tell when she’s impinging on Keith’s thoughts or he on hers. It’s a hard feeling to describe. Like the subliminal awareness of another person standing at her side just past her peripheral vision, or a sudden stir of air in a still room. The moments of acute connection don’t seem to have much rhyme or reason to them. Sometimes they trigger when she’s thinking about something with some connection to Keith - the shack, the Knell, the upcoming sim lab. She catches a faint echo of the Knell on Wednesday, and that definitely sets it off - she’s struck by a flare of Keith’s hyperfocused presence and a resonance in the center of her chest that seems to linger even after they push themselves away from the connection. At other times, it happens when she’s thinking of nothing in particular, trekking across campus or standing in a hallway waiting for class to start. The connections are always momentary and fleeting. A few drowsy seconds of sun creeping across the porch while she’s in the cafeteria, a flash of highway noise and a thrill of adrenaline that jolts her upright during her electronics lecture. She catches sight of the tumbled rocks in the gully where they think the Knell lives on and off, mostly in the early mornings and evenings when it’s half dark, and can guess that Keith is trying to track it down. Once, she gets the indistinct impression of another faint set of petroglyphs, high up on a rock face above Keith’s head, along with a hazy, speculative interest in climbing up to see them better.

She thinks about messaging him a couple of times, but what would she say? “Sorry for accidentally spying on you, hope your search for psychic noises is going well?” Messaging feels kind of stupid when they keep bumping into each other’s thoughts. 

It does worry her that the contacts seem to be getting more vivid. She wants to think it’s just that she’s noticing more now that she’s actually paying attention to them, but that feels like an excuse. There’s nothing she can do about it in any case, and by the time the week draws to a close, it’s settled into a weird, uneasy new normal, with no end in sight.

* * *

Pidge tackles the alignment problem again on Saturday. She’s got it narrowed down to something happening in the guts of the motor driver and has a tedious afternoon lined up of pushing artificial values through it until she finds the right one to make it give the wrong output. It’s a boring task, made even more boring by the blazing, sterile landscape of the engineering building’s roof. She quickly decides she’s not up for doing it manually and spends the first couple of hours banging out a script to sweep the inputs and flag anomalies in the outputs. After that, it’s just a matter of waiting. With a sigh, she settles into the lee of the AC unit to start working through the problem set for her electronics class, resolutely not thinking about how much she would rather be doing this on the shack’s porch.

By mid-afternoon, she finds and fixes a rounding error and sets her script to rerun. It comes back clean this time, and the next day she recalibrates for good measure and points the receiver at the Europa station she’d been trying to track before. A couple of hours later, it’s still tracking correctly, and with a cautious thrill of excitement, she points it to a target a little farther out - a Titan satellite this time.

Over the course of the day she walks her mark further and further away from Earth. The targets get sparser and it takes longer to tell with each step, but by the time she’s finished, well after nightfall, she’s as certain as she can be that the alignment is performing as it should. Kerberos has already set by now, so she can’t go any further tonight, but she stares up into the sky for a long few breaths and tries to imagine how far away the probes she’s watching are, how much further away Pluto and its satellites are. 

Technically, there’s a curfew on Monday. She’s been playing it safe up until now, being careful not to call attention to herself, but Kerberos is only in the sky for a precious few hours and she’s so close to getting answers. She doesn’t have to think twice about lingering in the engineering building stairwell after her last class while security locks up the classrooms. If she gets caught, she’ll deal with it. It’s worth the risk. When the coast is clear, she creeps up to the roof and points the receiver to where Kerberos is due to cross the horizon. She sits on her impatience as best she can, and waits until about an hour after Kerberos has risen to check the data. 

She finds a distinct series of highs and lows, right where it should be in the spectrum, a clear digital signal. Her chest goes tight and suffocating, and she flops back on the roof, hugging herself tightly and staring up at the stars.

At the edge of her consciousness, there’s a sudden tinge of presence and concern from Keith and she realizes some of that must have leaked through to him. It fades as quickly as it usually does, but it brings her back to herself a little. She takes a breath and pulls out her phone, even though it feels a little ridiculous to text him when her brain insists he’s right there.

_found it_

There’s another quick spike in his mental presence and a short pause before he begins typing.

_the black box?_

_think so. haven’t really looked at it yet, but that’s got to be it_

She frowns and considers. 

_decoding it might take a while_

_you’ll figure it out_

_yeah_

His typing starts and stops several times before the next message shows up.

_good work_

She snorts, feels a smile pulling at her lips. It’s a very Keith kind of congratulations. She stays there for a while, watching the dark sky while the receiver logs its data, phone clutched in her hand, the space under her ribs crowded with something a little like grief and a little like hope. They’re finally getting somewhere. She might finally get some answers. Keith is a faint electric hum at the edge of her awareness, steady and familiar. And maybe it’s dumb and a bad idea, but she doesn’t pull away from it for a little while and neither does he.

* * *

She has to wait until the next evening to really look at what she’s got. The data is clear as day, an obvious cyclic transmission originating from Kerberos’ coordinates, repeating on an hourly basis. To her surprise, she picked up something else as well. There’s a distinct analog signal hiding in the logs, nothing like the digitally encoded Kerberos transmission. It’s sitting well above the noise floor of the measurements and it definitely looks like a real signal. She puzzles over it for a few minutes and then puts it aside as a curiosity to look at later - an instrument from one of the early unmanned Kuiper belt probes maybe, or some kind of weird local radio source. Interesting, but not important.

She’s much more interested in what the black box transmission can tell her.

Decoding it would have been difficult before she’d enrolled at the Garrison. Without context, it’s an undifferentiated series of packets stuffed with ones and zeroes. She could probably have made something of it eventually with a couple of good guesses about header contents, but fortunately, she doesn’t have to. All it takes is lingering after class in the comms lab and digging through a dusty cabinet of manuals on the pretext of an extra-credit project. That nets her a definition for the standard instrumentation transmission protocol. She’s betting that there’s no special encoding for black box transmissions. If there is, well, she’ll figure it out. 

She’s still got work ahead of her. The protocol tells her the structure of the transmission and the encoding of the bitfields it contains, but she still needs to translate it. It’s a lot of data, and she definitely doesn’t trust herself to do it by hand. It’s too important to risk a mistake. She makes the executive decision that her electronics lab report can wait and writes a decoder application over the next night. 

She comes out with a fifty-eight percent on the lab report, but it’s worth it. To her relief, the data breaks down cleanly along the lines of the instrumentation protocol and she comes out with a document that details (among other things) the Kerberos lander’s fuel levels, engine vector and throttle, relative pitch, roll, and yaw coordinates, and environmental sensor data, taken at fifty millisecond intervals over the course of its last registered acceleration event.

It looks… fine. Normal. The system error register has a NOFAULT code. She’s not a pilot, but the acceleration and attitude look smooth, no wild swings or sudden spikes. The final bump in acceleration where the lander must have touched down is barely present. She combs through it over and over, looking for anything out of place, a cold weight settling in the pit of her stomach, before sending it off to Keith. He’s a pilot. He knows what a landing’s supposed to look like. Maybe he can see something she’s missing. 

She’s not sure if she wants him to find something or not. 

She swallows. If he doesn’t, it doesn’t answer what happened to the crew. If there was no crash, they’d have had enough water and oxygen to keep themselves alive for a little while. Surely they would have called home. If they didn’t… She squeezes her eyes shut and focuses on keeping her feelings to herself.

She gets a sharp jolt of attention when Keith gets the log, and then things go quiet for a while. She tries futilely to concentrate on her homework, doing her best to keep her thoughts away from that distant sense of focus in the back of her mind, but she just winds up reading the same page over and over again, putting new toothmarks in her pen. A little over an hour later, her phone buzzes, startling her out of her daze.

_there’s nothing wrong with it_

She bites her lip.

_you’re sure?_

_no big changes in acceleration. no major course corrections. weight on wheels at the end_  
_there’s no crash_  
_it’s bullshit_  
_they’re lying to us_

There’s a snap in the link like a dam giving way. Keith is suddenly there, a churning, pressurized knot of emotion that feels a hair’s breadth away from boiling over. Alarmed, she reflexively reaches out to him before she can think better of it. She doesn’t get back anything coherent, just an overwhelming mental impulse to action and a spike of awareness of her presence. His attention abruptly snaps onto something else, and after a second, she recognizes the phantom grip of a bike’s handlebars. Keith shoves a wordless push of _get out of my head_ over the link, and the connection cuts. 

Pidge is shocked back to herself, alone in her room. “Damn it.”

She draws in a shuddering breath, holds it and lets it out again, puts her pen down before she snaps it. Maybe Keith has the right idea. She just feels mad and tired, too wrung out to really think about anything. She picks up the pen again and digs the point of it into her notepad, leans into it until the paper dents. This shouldn’t be hitting her so hard. She’d already known the Garrison was lying and that her dad and Matt were gone. It’s not new information.

“Stupid,” she mutters venomously, and scrubs her sleeve across her eyes.

She spends the next while trying and mostly failing to do the most mindless homework she has because she doesn’t know what else to do, but she can’t do nothing. Maybe Keith’s need to just _do something_ set something off in her brain. She catches indistinct impressions off and on of the bike in the desert, too quick to register as more than a messy sense of acceleration and speed. It’s several hours later before her phone buzzes again. 

_sorry_

She lets out a breath, relieved. If she concentrates, she can feel the background sense of Keith’s presence still wound taut, but there’s less of that suffocating pressure to it now. She hesitates a long moment before replying, but then does it anyways.

_you okay?_

A few seconds go by before he replies.

_yeah_  
_you?_

_Is_ she okay? She’s not sure.

_as okay as I’m going to be_

  
He starts and stops typing several times, but nothing else comes through, and after a few minutes, she puts the phone down. 

* * *

Pidge wakes up the next morning somehow numb and mad at the same time. The Garrison is lying to them. Her dad and Matt are gone. Shiro is gone. They probably died cold and frightened on some lonely, dark chunk of ice at the edge of the solar system, and somebody here decided to hide that from her and her mom and Keith and everyone else they’d known. Somehow, she is going to take the Garrison apart piece by piece until she she knows who made that decision and why. Keith is a restless itch in the back of her head in fits and starts, a series of sharp, jagged impressions of the bike’s acceleration and rock under his fingers. She’s not sure which of them keeps firing up the connection. It’s probably both of them. Trying to keep it from happening doesn’t really seem worth it at the moment.

She takes the coward’s way out and calls out sick to her classes. She’s not going to be able to concentrate anyways. 

Instead, she picks through the black box log again, and then again, looking for any tiny inconsistency, anything that might hint at some kind of subtle, imminent equipment failure. It looks just as innocent as it did the night before. She goes back to the instrumentation protocol and her decoding application, combs through those looking for any conversions she might have fudged, any fields she might have misinterpreted, but that’s rock solid as well. 

She’d spent so much time on the receiver, so much painstaking effort to calibrate and align and decode, that it seems unfair that the black box transmission can’t tell her anything new. That it can’t give her some reason for what happened.

She even goes back to the raw transmissions, looking for anything she’s missed, anything hiding in the intermessage gaps. It’s grasping at straws and she knows it - there’s no reason for the black box to be transmitting anything outside a standard periodic message frame - but she can’t let it go by without checking. She flips through frame after frame, looking for something out of place, and comes up with absolutely nothing. 

She pages to the next file in the directory and halts, frowning.

It’s the weird analog signal. The one that isn’t part of the black box transmission. It’s probably nothing, just a lucky coincidence catching a transmission from one of one of the old probes. 

But it’s the only thing she’s picked up that sticks out.

She bites carefully at the edge of her lip and takes a closer look. It still looks like a real signal - there’s none of the random fuzz that she associates with noise or instrumentation artifacts, and it’s pegged dead on a frequency sitting at the lower end of the Garrison deep-space band. In fact, it’s so dead-on that frequency that it looks kind of like an AM signal. She blinks and knocks out a few lines of code to strip out the carrier wave. She’s left looking at a sparser, but still recognizable signal. It’s broken up into chunks, which she supposes could be some kind of packet. They’re not uniform in size, but that doesn’t necessarily rule it out. The amplitude within a packet is variable, and so is the frequency. It might be some kind of encoding scheme, but neither really varies by much and it seems like a really fragile way to encode data. In fact… She selects a few packets and checks their average values.

“Huh.” There are two distinct frequency modes present. The packets seem to alternate between them.

She squints at the screen and shakes her head slightly, trying to dispel the ludicrous idea creeping up on her. It doesn’t back down. She hesitates a second, and then does a quick conversion to audio and opens it in her music player. She shifts the headphones slightly off her ears and hits play, holding her breath despite herself.

The first few seconds are just a slightly crackly silence. Then the tracker hits the first packet, and there’s a recognizable _voice_ in her ears.

She bolts upright and slams the stop button, heart pounding. Keith is suddenly acutely present, tense and worried. _Need to focus,_ she shoves at him, and he backs off, a distant, watchful hum on the edge of her awareness. She swallows and drags the tracker back to the start. That was a _person_.

She hits play again, and this time she listens through to the end. It’s two people, exchanging clipped, precise words in a language she doesn’t recognize. There’s no mistaking it for anything else. She feels cold all over. There’s no other manned mission anywhere near Kerberos. There can’t be. Kerberos was a three-year, cutting-edge effort with government funding and technological contributions from twelve separate international research institutions. There’s no keeping an endeavor like that a secret. 

She double- and triple-checks the receiver’s log. It’s not an alignment error.

Somebody is out there.

Keith is still hovering at the edge of the link, watchful and concerned. She reaches for her phone to message him, but pauses, eyes darting to the transmission playback on her monitor. 

If it really is what she thinks it is, it doesn’t seem like something that she should put in a message. Maybe it would be fine, but there are a lot of things she’s second-guessing about the Garrison right now. Leaving a record in writing suddenly seems like a terrible idea. There’s the obvious alternative, but she and Keith have been staying out of contact for a reason.

She bites at her lip. On the other hand, staying out of contact doesn’t really seem to be helping with their psychic problem. Frankly, they haven’t managed to do a great job of staying out of each other’s heads even when they’re actively trying. If anything, the connection feels stronger.

_Screw it,_ she thinks, and picks up the phone.

_you’re going to need to see this_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With apologies to Professor M., who probably didn't imagine that this was what I would do with what I learned in his DSP class.


	6. Chapter 6

Keith is already waiting when Pidge pulls into the commuter lot. He raises a hand in greeting, and she eases the bike over.

“What was so important that I had to see it?” he says. He’s frowning faintly, a worried line between his brows. 

“You’ll see.” She hesitates a second. “Don’t think it would be a good idea to put it in a message.”

He raises his eyebrows and there’s a momentary sting of curiosity through the connection. There’s an awkward pause as they both avert their eyes and pretend they didn’t notice it. “Huh,” he says under his breath, and kicks his bike’s stand up. “C’mon.” Pidge follows suit and they make their way out of the lot.

At the shack, they head instead and settle on the lumpy futon. Without comment, Keith retrieves the fan while she pulls her computer out of her bag and points it at her. She catches his eye and snorts, and the corner of his mouth quirks up. She wastes no time in pulling up the audio file. “I got this in the same run as the black box transmission.”

Keith visibly starts when the voice comes in, and the link jumps like a bike hitting a pocket of hot air. She lets the file play out to the end before continuing. “It came from about the same place as the black box - there’s no difference in the alignment coordinates at those timestamps.”

Keith stares at her computer, brow knit, and leans forward to loop the file back around to its beginning. “Another Kuiper belt mission?” he suggests, though he doesn’t sound like he believes it.

“But how? Where would they get the resources? Kerberos was state-of-the-art - how would you keep building something like that a secret?” 

Keith grunts and makes a frustrated hiss through his teeth. “And why? There’s nothing out there. Just rocks and ice. What would be the point?”

Pidge nods decisively. “Exactly. It doesn’t make any sense.” The recording hits its end and loops back to the start. The first speaker starts their hail again. She gestures at the screen. “I put that through all the translation applications I could find. It doesn’t get any matches.”

“There are hundreds of languages,” Keith points out skeptically.

“Yeah, but how many of them would be likely on a deep space mission that requires massive funding and political buy-in?” 

He grimaces.

“Besides,” she scrunches her nose as the speaker draws out their last syllable in an extended, menacing-sounding rumble, “listen to that. That’s not a regular human language noise.”

Keith blinks before clearing his throat and producing a similar rasping, back-of-the-throat noise. “What, that?” he says uncertainly.

She squints back at him. “Weird flex, but okay. My point stands. It doesn’t match up to any of the likely languages for a Kuiper belt mission.”

He goes silent for a few seconds, scowling down at her computer. In the back of her mind, she can faintly sense him turning it over. “Is ‘aliens’ really what we’re going with?” he says reluctantly.

She throws up her hands. “I don’t know what else we can go with.”

Keith makes a disgruntled noise of acquiescence and settles back into the couch, thumb running restlessly over his knuckles. “You think the Garrison knows about it?” he says after a minute.

She pushes herself a little further into the futon until the springs creak in protest - she’s been thinking about that question for most of the last night. “They practically have to. It’s sitting right in one of the standard data communications bands. If I could pick it up with a homemade receiver, they should definitely be getting it.”

Keith’s lips draw out to a thin line. In the back of her mind, there’s a tense electric hum. “It seems like an awfully big coincidence that it’s out near Kerberos.”

“Yeah. It does,” she says grimly, and takes a breath. “I think the Garrison knows all about it. I think they lied about what happened to Kerberos because they didn’t want anybody else listening in.”

A beat passes. “You think whoever that is-” he gestures to the computer “-had something to do with what happened to the mission?”

Her gut clenches. She’s been trying not to think it, but it’s hard to avoid. “Maybe.”

The electric hum through the link sparks and snaps. Keith lets out a hiss through his teeth, fingers clenching on the sleeves of his jacket. “Damn it.” His jaw tightens and releases. “What the hell do we do about that?”

“I don’t know!” she bursts out. “I was expecting equipment failure, or bad instructions from ground control, or… or communications malfunction. Not aliens! I don’t know what we do about aliens!” She curls in on herself, feeling small and miserable and useless. “I don’t know what we do about this.”

There’s a scrambled, frazzled hiss of emotion along the connection before Keith reins it back in. “Shit. Sorry. Pidge, I…” She startles as Keith’s hand descends on her shoulder in an awkward, deliberate pat. He’s wearing an expression equal parts panic and determination. He gives her shoulder another stiff pat and she hears him mutter something about patience to himself. “I… okay. Okay,” he says aloud. “What do we need to do _next?_ We can figure out the rest later.”

Keith hesitantly pats her shoulder once more, looking desperately unsure of what he’s doing. The contact helps. She takes a deep breath, and then another, and tries to focus. Just next steps. No further. What do they need next? She swallows. What would her dad have wanted to know? “We have to get more data,” she says at last. “We’ve only got the one sample right now. It could be just a fluke that we caught it.”

Keith leans back into the futon and crosses his arms. “You mean like if they were just passing through?”

“Yeah. Maybe they were headed somewhere somewhere else and the receiver was just pointed at the right place at the right time.” He gives a noncommittal hum, and she takes another breath, steadier now. “If they’re not just passing through, we need to figure out exactly where they are and make sure there’s nothing else out there we could be picking up.”

“But-”

“I know! I don’t think there is, but we have to rule it out.”

He considers this a moment, and then makes a face. “So… more data-logging?”

“Yeah,” she sighs.

“Okay,” he says firmly. “Then that’s what we do.” The quiet holds for a second, and then Keith drags his hand over his face. _“Aliens,”_ he grumbles.

She snorts. “Why not? With the psychic thing we’re two for two now.”

She feels him flinch a little, and then very deliberately hold himself still. He lets out a breath. “Yeah. That.”

An uneasy silence moves in and Pidge bites her lip. “Staying apart didn’t work.”

A breath of disquiet ripples through the link. “Yeah. I don’t think it’s going away,” Keith says. 

She contemplates that, staring absently at the cluttered corkboard across from them. Are they just tangled up with each other permanently now? It’s starting to seem like it. A chill runs up her spine. She’s gotten more used to it, and Keith is not the worst person to be psychically stapled to, but it’s still creepy and invasive. She shakes it aside and frowns. “I wish we knew more about how it happened in the first place.”

“I still think it’s the Knell.”

“Sure. But how? Why?”

Keith makes a frustrated noise in the back of his throat and leans forward to rest his elbows on his knees. “I don’t know. It feels like it _wants_ something, but I can’t tell what. I keep looking for it, but I’m not getting anywhere.”

She winces a little. “I caught some of that, I think.”

He goes still for a second, and she catches a ghost of the prickling along his spine before he lets out a breath and forcibly relaxes his shoulders. “Yeah. I could tell sometimes. When you were there.”

“Sorry.”

He shakes his head. “Not like you could help it. I kept crashing your ops class.”

“Pretty sure I got the better end of the deal there,” she says. It comes out a little forced, but he gives a quiet huff of amusement.

She hesitates a moment. “Even if we do find the Knell, it might not change anything. We might be stuck with this.”

Keith grimaces, but doesn’t disagree. The silence lingers, stretching out while he taps his fingers in a slow, thinking rhythm on the edge of the table. “We need rules for it,” he says at last.

“Rules?”

“Like… no prying. No digging for each others’ thoughts.”

She cringes hard. “Yeah. Let’s make that Rule Number One.” She purses her lips, thinking. “No spying, either. No lurking in the background and watching.”

He flinches back a little. “We’ve both already done that by accident.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to completely avoid it, but if we can at least find some way to make sure the other person knows we’re there? No offense, but if you’re hanging out in my head, I want to know about it.”

“None taken.” A few seconds pass, and he shifts uncomfortably in place. “What if we, uh, knock?”

She raises a brow. “‘Knock?’”

He frowns and makes a vague gesture in the air between them. “Can I…?”

She hesitates a second, but then shrugs. “Yeah, go ahead.”

He nods, and she starts as there’s a sudden prodding sensation over the link. It’s a bizarre feeling - not painful, but definitely attention-grabbing. She shakes her head. “That’ll work.” She eyes him. “Can I try it on you?”

He gives a grunt of assent. Cautiously, she reaches out and tries to imitate that sensation of pointed presence. Keith’s shoulders twitch and he makes a faint, hitching noise. “Yeah, not going to ignore that,” he says wryly.

Slightly concerned, she narrows her eyes at him. “Is that…?”

“No, it’s fine. Just startled me.”

“Okay.” She thinks for a moment. “If one of us tells the other to get out of their head, they do it, no questions asked.”

He gives a decisive nod. “Agreed.” He pauses, fingers tapping steadily. “We don’t tell anyone else about it.”

She shoots him an incredulous look. “Of _course_ we don’t tell anyone else about it.”

He shrugs and the corner of his mouth twitches up. “Just putting it out there.”

She scoffs, but can feel a mental tension she hadn’t been aware of start to loosen. It feels better having rules for it. Not that she thinks either of them would have purposely broken those rules before, but having them makes it feel more like something they can deal with and less like an unpredictable, unknowable force jerking them around. She slumps a little further into the couch. “Ugh. This is so weird.”

Keith makes a vague assenting noise and leans back into the couch as well. “You think it’s worth going back to trying to stay separated?” he asks after a few seconds.

“Not really. I don’t think it did much of anything.”

He hums. “I think-”

“-it’s stronger now.” There’s an uncomfortable little pause while they both pretend to ignore that, and then she snorts and continues. “Yeah. I think you’re right. I don’t know what we do about it, though.”

“Don’t think there’s much we can do.” 

She bites at her lip. “I guess we just… make do. Live with it for now.”

“For now,” he echoes. The quiet holds for a second. “It’s… good. To have you back, though,” Keith says slowly, not looking at her. “Here, I mean. Physically.”

She lets out a breath and feels a smile creep across her face, something settling in her chest. “Yeah. It’s good to be back.”

* * *

She spends the rest of the day reworking the receiver’s targeting routine to sweep the sky and log anything it picks up on the aliens’ frequency. With any luck, it’ll capture enough datapoints (assuming the aliens aren’t just passing through) to build a trajectory. It’s still more haphazard than she’d like - it relies on the aliens using their comms regularly - but it’s a first step. It’s _something_ , she reminds herself. She falls easily back into the routine of chipping away at the code on the porch while Keith takes something apart next to her. There’s a faint background awareness of the connection, like a draft through an open door at her back, but by unspoken mutual agreement, they do their best to pretend it doesn’t exist and it’s mercifully only a minor distraction for the rest of the day. 

She quickly decides that it makes more sense to leave the receiver set up at the shack than it does at the Garrison. Now that she’s looking for a long-term pattern, she’s going to have to just leave it to log uninterrupted, and there’s no guarantee someone won’t find it on the engineering building roof. At the shack, Keith can at least keep an eye on it for her, even though it means she won’t get to check the data as it comes in. She coaches him through the power-up, power-down, and reset procedures (which he endures with good grace), and he solemnly promises to send her the logs when he goes into town. By the end of the weekend, she’s done all she can and there’s nothing to do but wait.

In some ways, it’s a better wait than the last one. The realization that the connection between them isn’t going away any time soon takes away some of the urgency and paranoia. She spends less time anxiously monitoring herself against accidental slips into the link and more time trying to figure out how to manage the contacts when they inevitably occur. Having the rules helps. The framework for what to expect and what’s off-limits makes it feel safer, more controllable. After a couple of days, they manage to bring the knock down from a sensation like touching your tongue to a battery to the much more benign feeling of holding a phone set to vibrate, which also helps, though the sensation doesn't get any less strange. 

For the first couple of days, she’s still holding her breath, worried that the link is going to throw itself into overdrive now that they’re no longer immediately stomping on it when it flares up. But to her relief, neither of them seem to be picking up each other’s innermost private thoughts just yet. The frequency of the contacts does seem to increase, which is maybe cause for concern, but she’s not convinced it wasn’t doing that beforehand. Keith flickers in and out of her consciousness like heat lightning, and a persistent, low-level awareness of him becomes familiar, if not wholly comfortable. Sometimes, she finds herself checking for it, not with any intention of making contact, but in the same way she pats her pocket after leaving her room to check for her student ID.

The sense she gets of him is restless and frustrated. He’s out in the desert in the early morning and evening, extending well into the night, combing his way through that square half mile of land hiding the Knell’s source. She catches ghost impressions of rock under her fingers and chill pre-dawn air in the back of his throat, and faintly, like it’s coming through a layer of cotton, a resonance in her chest, like the ring of a gong. His thoughts feel sharper out there, drawn to a fine focus like he’s listening to something just outside the range of her hearing.

When she starts awake at three-thirty one morning, heart still racing at the jump and scramble to see a new set of petroglyphs that woke her up, she rolls over in her bunk and blearily grabs her phone to message him.

_why are you doing this at 3:30am?_

There’s a distant snap of surprise, and she waits impatiently for him to get himself down from whatever ledge he’s hanging off and extract his phone.

_sorry_   
_didn’t think you were awake_

_I am now_   
_seriously_   
_why are you doing this now?_

_it’s dark out_   
_better than doing it during the day_

A faint impression of heat and painfully bright glare surfaces in the back of her mind and she grimaces.

_3:30 though_

_like you’re one to talk_

_when I’m up at 3:30 it’s because I’m writing code at the hour god intended_   
_not climbing rocks in the middle of nowhere_

She gets a brief, quiet flash of amusement, and a ghost of the smooth metal of the bike’s body under his hand. The amusement dwindles down and is replaced by a wary curiosity.

_how much of this are you getting?_

_not that much_   
_I can tell you’re in the desert_   
_looking for the knell_   
_climbing rocks_

She pauses, curious.

_why? what do you get from me?_

_about the same_   
_nothing really specific_

_vague, but comforting_

There’s a brief pause and a hint of tired frustration seeps through before Keith closes it off.

_I just wish it would show up_   
_it keeps calling like it wants me to do something_   
_but I don’t know what it is and I can’t find anything out here_

She bites her lip.

_I’ll help you look for it this weekend_

_thanks_

He’s quiet for a minute and she’s just started to drift off before the phone buzzes again. She cracks her eyes open long enough to read the last message before burying her head under the covers again.

_going into town tomorrow_   
_I’ll send you the logs_

* * *

  
True to his word, he sends her the files from the public library in the afternoon. It’s not perfect - it’s just a list of coordinates and timestamps where the receiver picked up something on the frequency of interest - but there’s enough of it for her to build a pattern. Assuming the logs aren’t filled with false positives, the alien transmissions occur at regular intervals and cluster in a tight grouping in the Kuiper belt, likely orbiting a distant, slow-moving dwarf planet and nearly stationary with respect to the Earth’s orbit. Such a localized occurrence sharply limits the possibilities for alternate, non-alien explanations, but it sets up plenty of other questions. What’s so interesting out there? How long have they been there? Who’s on the other end of those transmissions? Are there more of them out there?

What, exactly, does the Garrison know about them?

Even though at this point she’s pretty sure of what she’ll find, Pidge does her duty and trawls through the the listings of astronomical radio sources, looking for anything that might match up to those coordinates. There’s nothing much there - a few unmanned probes in the outer planets, but there’s no reason for them to have any kind of audio communications. She supposes it could conceivably be some kind of weird local bounce, someone on Earth squatting in the Garrison’s frequency band, but she’s pretty sure the FCC doesn’t appreciate that kind of thing. The actual audio sample continues to defy all the translation software she throws at it. _Aliens_ remains the most convincing explanation. She messages Keith as much, in the most general terms she can. She’ll still need to look at the actual data for confirmation, but it’s hard to see what else it could be.

Somehow, in the middle of all this, life continues, though her classes are definitely low on her list of priorities at the moment. When she’s assigned her flight team at the end of the week, it’s much less exciting than it would have been in any other circumstances.

“Fighter Team Five,” the instructor calls out, and points to the worktable on the far left of the room. “Communications: Gunderson, Engineer: Garrett, Pilot: McClain. Take your seats.”

By the time Pidge makes her way over from the back of the crowd, the other two are already in their places. She knows Hunk Garrett a little - he’s in one of the shared engineer/communications sections of Electronics II. He’s one of the few in the class not to have toasted an amp during lab, so he’s probably all right. She doesn’t know the pilot - a tall, gangly boy whose knee is bouncing restlessly under the table - but Hunk apparently does. They’re wedged shoulder-to-shoulder, poring over something on the syllabus. She sits down across the table from them, and Hunk looks up.

“Hey,” he smiles. “Pidge, right?”

“Yeah. You’re Hunk?”

“Uh-huh.” He beams.

The pilot leans over the table and sticks out his hand. “I’m Lance.” He grins and puffs up his chest a little. “Just wait, we’re gonna be a great team.”

She raises a brow skeptically, but reaches out and takes his hand.

The Knell sounds the moment she closes her fingers.

It’s louder than she’s ever heard it before, so clear and distinct she only barely keeps from clapping her hands over her ears. Keith is suddenly, immediately with her, an almost physical presence, his heart thudding behind hers, everything in him narrowed down on the Knell. He knocks, a little belatedly, but it’s nearly drowned out in the overwhelming wall of mental noise. There’s a heavy drag in her chest, vibrating in time with the Knell’s rise and fall. Vaguely, in the very back of her head, she thinks she owes Keith an apology - if this is what he’s been feeling, it’s no wonder he’s so desperate to track it down. 

There’s a pulse, and the pull in her chest clenches and tugs. She and Keith both startle, and their attention turns to follow it, like a compass needle pointing North. With a shock, she realizes it’s pointing right to Lance.

As if that’s what it’s been waiting for, the Knell pulses once decisively and dies. She belatedly realizes she’s got a thousand-yard stare and a death-grip on Lance’s hand. 

“Uh…” he starts, staring at their weird handshake.

She shakes her head and opens her fingers. “Sorry. Just remembered something.”

Lance’s eyebrows raise skeptically. “Sure.” She feels herself flush, and he hastily brings up his hands. “It’s cool, it’s cool, we all have those days, right?” Thankfully, he turns his attention back to Hunk, and she sinks down into her chair.

Keith is still there. She can feel him focusing on something. After a second, she gets a complicated tangle of thoughts - an echo of the Knell, a vague impression of Lance, a flash of confusion and urgency with the distinct mental flavor of profanity.

_Yeah,_ she thinks back. _Just what the hell was that?_


	7. Chapter 7

Pidge doesn’t wait on niceties when she meets up with Keith the next day.

“What was that? With the Knell yesterday.”

He shakes his head, frustrated. “I don’t know. It’s never done that before.” His hands work open and closed like he wants to take something apart. “It’s back to normal now. Went back out the gully after and it’s no different. I still can’t find it,” he says bitterly, and pauses, scowling. “Who was that guy?”

She frowns, and after a second, thumps herself down on the porch to start downloading the receiver’s data. “Lance. He’s supposed to be the pilot for my flight team.” She pauses to look sideways up at him. “You were on the pilot track. You don’t know him?”

“I don’t… think so?” There’s more than a hint of uncertainty about that thought. He shakes his head. “Maybe he was in another section or something. Did he notice it?”

“I think he was mostly focused on me crushing his hand.”

He snorts, but quickly sobers, crouching down on the porch beside her. “I don’t get it. What’s special about this guy?”

“Beats me.” She frowns, thinking back on it. She’d been so intent on the shock of the Knell that she hadn’t noticed much else, but then again she doesn’t have the same sense of it that Keith does. Would have picked up on anything different if he’d been there?

Some of that thought must leak through. Keith tilts his head and she gets a vague sense of curiosity. “Nothing. Just wondering if you would have noticed anything else.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Doubt it. You were there and you didn’t catch anything.”

“You’re better at picking up on the Knell than I am.”

He shifts in place a little in the way he does when he’s uncomfortable, and his end of the link goes quiet. “Not saying much,” he says curtly, and blows out a frustrated breath.

“You said it feels like it wants something.”

“Yeah.” He considers, and revises. “Or like it wants us to do something.”

“Like it wants us to do something about Lance?”

“…Huh.” He’s quiet for a few seconds. She lets him think it over while she transfers the files onto her computer. At last, he shakes his head. “I don’t know. I mean, there was definitely a reaction there, but I don’t know what we’re supposed to do about it, short of dragging him out here and seeing what happens.”

There’s a considering silence.

At last she puffs out a breath. “What would we do with him, though? Just… play hot or cold? ‘Hey, are you hearing anything weird right now? No? What about now?’”

Keith pushes out a short, sharp hiss through his teeth. “I don’t know.” He gives a quick shake of his head. “Hate this,” he mutters. “Feels like we’re close. Like we’re supposed to be doing something more.”

Pidge makes a face, but she can’t think of anything else to do about it either, and they lapse into silence while she pages through the receiver data. She lets out a low whistle as she comes to the end. “Not a lot in here that looks like a false positive.”

Keith looks over to her. “Can you-” 

“Yeah. Give me a second.” He leans over her shoulder to watch as she exports the dataset she’s looking at and opens it up.

Like the first transmission, it’s a clipped conversation between two speakers. It might even be the same two people. She plays the original transmission again for comparison, but it’s hard to tell how much tonal difference is due to audio quality or inflection or just the language. Slowly, she weeds through the rest of the data the receiver has logged, throwing out anything that looks like just noise, or singular glitchy events. She plays the files that remain one-by-one, Keith watching over her shoulder with quiet, focused interest. All of them contain a similar exchange. With a larger sample size, it’s easier to pick up on the character of the language and its strangeness. A lot of the sounds are familiar. There’s definitely a ‘t’ and an ‘s’ and a rolled ‘r’ and a glottal ‘g’ sound. But there’s also that rasping noise, and some kind of trill that trails out in a buzz, and a complex of throaty clicking sounds. It’s both fascinating to listen to and convincingly alien.

They go through all of them and she saves them to the encrypted secondary drive, backs them up twice to be sure, the weight in her chest growing heavier with each file. The quantity and clarity of the transmissions is damning.

“There’s no way the Garrison doesn’t know about this,” she says in the quiet after they’ve reached the end of the directory. “Not this many transmissions, not when they’re so consistent. There’s nothing else anywhere near those coordinates that’s supposed to be transmitting on that frequency. I checked.” She takes a breath and spits out the thought that’s been slowly sinking its roots into her over the last week. “I’m going to try and get back into the Kerberos server.”

Keith frowns and something runs through the link like the invisible current under a calm sea. “You got caught before.”

“Yeah. But that was different. It’ll be easier now that I’m at the Garrison.” He’s staring at her, fingers starting to tap against his elbows, and she glances away. “I was going to wait until I could get close to an actual mission, but…” 

“If they’re hiding this…” he says slowly.

She lets out a hard breath. “Yeah. This is so much bigger than I thought it was. If… if they let Dad and Matt die for this and covered it up, I can’t let them keep doing it. I know it’s a risk, but…”

Keith watches her steadily, eyes dark against the glare reflecting off the porch. In the back of her mind, she can feel his thoughts ticking down some track, taut and laser-focused. “Maybe you don’t have to take the risk,” he says.

“What?” she says.

He frowns and works his fingers. “I can’t do what you do with computers, but if you just need to get into an office, I can do that.” His shoulders hitch up uncomfortably. “I’m pretty good with locks. If I got to the right computer, could you tell me what to do?”

She stares, the gears in her mind turning. “I… maybe. That doesn’t really remove the risk, though. It just puts it all on you.”

His chin juts and he gives a jerky shrug. “Better me than you.”

“Don’t be stupid,” she snaps. “If I get caught, I’ll be charged as a minor, but you’re like eighteen, right?”

“If you get caught, it’ll be your second offense. They could charge you as adult too,” he retorts. Her mouth snaps shut. Keith glares at her for a second, an echo of the tension in his shoulders leaching through to her. His gaze wanders off somewhere into the desert again. “Look, I can’t just… stay out here chasing strange noises and not doing anything. If you do it and you get caught, we’re stuck. We’re never going to figure out what happened. If I do it and things go wrong, you’ve still got a shot at figuring out what happened to Kerberos. You could stay at the Garrison and go to space if you wanted, or you could go home, or just… you’ve got choices.” He pauses for a moment and something bitter twists through the connection. “I already fucking blew my chances at the Garrison,” he mumbles, so low she’s not sure she’s supposed to hear it.

There’s a shadow under the words - an ache and an absence and an anger so old it’s started eating its own tail. The cramped, dusty interior of the shack, and the bright, empty expanse of the desert stretching out forever, still as a tomb.

Keith is like her in a lot of ways - sharp and focused and driven. It’s never occurred to her that he’s not driving _towards_ anything.

“Stop that,” he hisses, back stiff. 

She starts, and jerks back from the link. “Shit. Sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.” A chill goes down her spine, followed immediately by guilt - she hadn’t even noticed the connection kick in. “Sorry,” she repeats more quietly. He inspects her for a long moment before finally giving a small, sharp nod. She lets out a slow breath in the silence and swallows, keeping her thoughts focused away from that back corner of her mind.

“Okay,” she says. “Then we have to plan it so we don’t get caught.”

* * *

They keep the plan simple - the fewer things that can go wrong, the better. Pidge will load the script she used the last time onto a portable drive. Keith will get onto campus, get to a computer with server access, and run it while Pidge keeps watch. He’ll leave as soon as it’s done, she’ll go about her day, and no one will be the wiser. If things start to go wrong at any point, they cut and run. If they keep their heads down and don’t take unnecessary chances, they’ll be in and out. 

That all sounds simple in theory, but the details take some working out.

Pidge’s original target had been the server room itself, but (she can attest from personal experience), security actually pays attention to who goes in and out. They eventually settle on Commander Iverson’s office computer instead. Iverson had been on the Kerberos mission ground team. It’s a good bet that he has the permissions to access the mission files. There’s still a risk that the information they really want will be locked down more tightly that Iverson’s rank allows, but there’s not much they can do about that, and there are other factors that make him a good target. Crucially, Iverson proctors Pidge’s sim lab. She’s had a chance to watch him and she knows that he doesn’t habitually lock his computer when he leaves it. Equally important, his schedule is posted on his office door for anyone to see. They can pick a time when he has a block of meetings lined up and be assured of a relatively clear window. 

She’s a little worried about how they’ll actually gain access to the office, but Keith is insistent that a locked door won’t be a problem for him. That sounds like the kind of thing Matt and his friends might brag about without any real expertise, but he’s utterly serious about it and mildly uncomfortable, without any hint of pride. She doesn’t think he’s lying or exaggerating, and has to sit down hard on her own curiosity. She’s rewarded with a faint breath of relief, and is guiltily glad of her restraint.

The other problem is getting Keith onto campus in the first place. The visitor lot gate isn’t a possibility - she’d have to call him into security, which will immediately implicate her if anything does go wrong. The student entrance is a better option - it has an automated gate, without any personnel staffing it. Keith knows the campus and he still has his old uniform. So long as he keeps his distance from anyone who might recognize him, he should pass for a cadet. He’ll just need a current student ID to get through the gate check. That’s something she can take care of, though it’ll need some hardware. She places the order for the electronics as soon as she gets back to the Garrison, and from then it’s just waiting. 

In the meantime, the days tick by slowly. She puts enough effort into her classes not to attract attention, but it’s hard to focus on homework and lectures when she might be so close to learning some part of the truth. Maybe that’s part of why it takes her so much by surprise when Lance and Hunk flag her down in the cafeteria. She hadn’t really thought anything more about the fact that she’s been assigned to a flight team. At most, she’d expected her teammates to be casually polite outside of their shared lab. It hadn’t occurred to her that they might want to socialize. But they’re both seated at the end of a table in the room’s far corner, Lance waving his arms exaggeratedly over his head. She hesitates a beat - she’s kind of counting on being unmemorable to most of the student body. But there’s still that spooky thing with the Knell and Lance to figure out, and it’ll probably look weird to ignore them in any case. She heads over and slides into the seat next to Hunk.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” she responds cautiously. Lance, in the middle of a bite, makes an indecipherable noise and waves again. She tries to eyeball him without making it obvious. He seems like a completely regular guy, but there’s a faint, maybe-imaginary echo of the Knell ringing in her ears whenever she looks at him. He gives no sign of noticing.

He gulps down his mouthful. “So you’re new here, right? I don’t remember seeing you around last year.”

“Yeah. Transferred in from Platt City Tech.” That’s what her school administration records say, at least.

“Yeah?” He perks up. “I’ve got a couple of cousins who go there.” She tenses up a little, hoping he’s not about to ask anything that’ll reveal that she’s never set foot in Platt City Tech in her life. Hunk rescues her.

“Whoa, that gotta be a pretty big change.”

“Though you gotta be doing pretty well for yourself if you’re on the fighter track with us,” Lance puts in with a grin and gestures at the three of them. “Top ten percent, right here.” 

“Why’d you switch? If you don’t mind my asking,” Hunk asks.

She pushes her glasses higher on her nose and digs her fork into the cafeteria enchiladas on her tray. “One of my uncles is a tech on the lunar ferry.” She shrugs. “I stayed with him last summer and it seemed cool.” It’s true enough, even though Uncle Ed doesn’t really have much to do with her presence in the Garrison.

“Nice. You like it so far?”

The question gives her pause. The Garrison’s the means to an end, a step on the way to figuring out what happened to her dad and Matt. Liking it hasn’t really entered into the equation. She hesitates, and settles on the easy answer. “Yeah, I guess.” She stabs at the enchiladas again. They’re still staring at her expectantly, so she scrounges through her class experience. “Exogeology homework might actually kill me, though,” she offers.

Lance groans dramatically, and Hunk winces. “Oh man, you’ve got Hutchins for that, right?” 

“Yeah.”

“It’s too bad you didn’t come in a year earlier - Commander Holt was teaching it last year. Way more interesting and less grindy.”

Her breath catches in her throat, and she freezes a second, winded like something’s punched into her stomach, before she finds her voice to cough up a vague response. There’s a tap at the edge of her awareness and a flicker of concern from Keith. _I’m fine,_ she shoves at him. He backs off and she shovels as much of the enchilada into her mouth as will fit to discourage further questions.

Hunk and Lance thankfully sidetrack into a discussion on the worst and best instructors this year. She contributes occasional perfunctory agreements where required and speed-eats her way through the rest of her lunch. She leaves as soon as she’s done, with a mumbled excuse about needing to drop off an assignment.

By the time she’s made the trek across campus to her next class, she feels kind of stupid about it. Her dad was an instructor here. Plenty of people at the Garrison know him and Matt. She should have expected to hear people talk about them - it’s not Lance and Hunk’s fault that it took her by surprise.

It still feels like a mistake and she winds up kind of avoiding them for the next few days. She tells herself that the fewer questions she answers, the less likely it is that anyone will realize she’s lying. Deep down though, she’s honest enough to know that the real reason she’s dodging them in the halls has very little to do with maintaining her cover and everything to do with a superstitious dread of hearing her father and brother’s names in the past tense.

It doesn’t last, of course. She can’t avoid them during sim lab.

Up until now, the instructors have been holding their hands through the exercises, getting them acclimated to the simulators with easy orbital passes and guided space station dockings. But this time, they’ve been given a mission and it’s up to them to get there, with no assistance from the instructor.

It’s nothing they haven’t done before with their temporary teams. By now some of the glamour has worn off and it’s routine enough to be a little bit boring. It’s another space station rendezvous - no docking required, just get up there, make a quick orbit, and make it back. Pidge settles into her station and ticks through her pre-flight checks one-by-one. They get their launch target and she plots out an escape path for them and bumps it off to Lance. In the very back of her mind, there’s a wistful breath of interest from Keith at the glow of the instrument panels. 

“All right, guys, you ready?” Lance twists partway around in his seat to see her and Hunk, which is technically a no-no, but they’re still on the tarmac.

“All set, looking good,” chimes in Hunk.

“Pidge?”

She examines her trajectory one last time and she nods. “Clear to proceed.”

“All right. Here we go!”

He flips the subsystems on one-by-one, Hunk calling out their status as they power up. Around them, the simulator rumbles and the interior lights dim. 

“Ready to launch. Call it in, Pidge.”

“Control, we are launching in 5…4…3…2…1.”

Lance hits the ignition. The cockpit shudders deep enough to rattle her teeth, and she’s pressed into her seat as they accelerate into the launch.

At first, things seem to be going well. But as they ascend, their angle of attack steepens, trailing right at the edge of their trajectory window.

“Hey,” she calls up to Lance. “You maybe want to back off on the pitch there? Cutting it pretty close.”

“Relax, we’re still in window. Top ten percent of the class, right? We can handle it.” She can just make out a tense grin on his face from where she sits. “Besides, it’ll get us up there faster.”

“It’s not a race.”

“Lance, buddy, I don’t like these control surface loads,” Hunk interjects. 

“Come on, it’ll be-” They all yelp as the simulator bounces and abruptly rolls right. 

“Oh yeah, that’s done it,” mutters Hunk queasily.

“It’s okay, we can pull out of it! I’m correcting!”

“Well correct faster!” she snaps.

The simulator’s nose pitches down in a sudden swooping motion that shoves Pidge forward into her harness and feels like it leaves her stomach somewhere a few feet above and behind her. 

“Too fast!” Hunk moans before being noisily sick into the compartment next to him. 

Somehow, they actually do manage to make it back down to the ground without a disastrous crash, but the mission is a definite failure. When they power down and troop out of the simulator, Commander Iverson is waiting for them. They line up at attention without having to be told.

“Disappointing, cadets.” He frowns down at Lance. “McClain, you’ve been warned before. Buckle down and stop trying to show off. You’re not impressing anyone.”

“Yes, sir,” mutters Lance, eyes downcast. Iverson eyes him for a moment before turning to Pidge.

“Gunderson, when your pilot deviates from the trajectory you’ve plotted, you don’t wait until it’s too late to tell them.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Garrett.” Iverson pauses and sighs. “You’re cleaning that up.”

“Yes, sir.”

They stand there in an unhappy line for another few seconds while he inspects them. “You’re in this section because your scores said you could handle it. If you want to keep that position, you’d better start living up to it. I expect better next time, cadets. Dismissed.” They mumble out a final, dispirited “yes, sir,” and he turns away. By now, the rest of the class is filing out the door on their way to the cafeteria.

“Jerk,” mumbles Lance once Iverson is at a safe distance.

Pidge side-eyes him hard. Lance catches it. “Don’t look at me like that. He’s always riding me. ‘Fly better, McClain, you’re on the fighter track now. You want to drop under the cutoff again?’ Yeah, thanks for reminding me.”

There’s an awkward silence, and then Hunk sighs. “Yeah, he does kind of seem like he has it in for you.” He waves vaguely in the direction of the door. “You guys might as well go on ahead. I’ve got to clean up here. Don’t think I’m going to be feeling up to food for a while anyways.”

Lance turns to look at him. “What? No, dude, come on. I’ll help you.” He seems to wilt a little, slumping in on himself. “Kind of my fault you got sick. Sorry, guys.”

Pidge hesitates. It’s a more sincere apology than she was expecting. Cleaning barf out of the simulator is just about the last thing she wants to do, but Iverson might have had a point in her role in the failure. It seems like a jerk move to just walk away. “I’ll help,” she says, before she can think better of it.

Hunk blinks a little and turns his head to look at her. “You sure? You definitely don’t have to. This one’s one-hundred percent on me and maybe Lance.”

“It’ll go faster with three of us, right?” She straightens up and shoves her glasses up onto her nose. “I’m not touching it, though.”

Hunk looks genuinely moved. Lance rallies and fingerguns at her. “Hey, see? Told you we’d be a great team.”

* * *

Lance and Hunk (who she’s starting to realize come as a set) somehow worm their way into her routine after that. They rope her into their chatter while they’re waiting for sim lab to start. Lance starts waving to her when they pass in the halls. Hunk sits next to her in their combined electronics lab. It’s the kind of easy, casual interaction that never seemed to work for her when she was going to the school she’s supposed to be going to, and part of her’s a little mad that somehow it’s working out here. Keith is no help - he just seems kind of wary and baffled.

They both pay careful attention to Lance. The faint, persistent ringing in her head around him doesn’t go away, and Keith confirms that he’s picking it up as well. If Lance notices it at all, he gives no sign of it. The Knell does sound once again while she’s waiting for sim lab to start. Again, it catapults Keith into her mental arena, but this time they’re both braced for it when it swings itself around to arrow itself at Lance. They both watch, holding their breaths. Lance pauses in the middle of his sentence, eyes going vague for a moment, and shakes his head before continuing on.

It’s not much, but it’s something, at least. It sparks another half-serious texted debate over whether they should somehow try to get Lance out to the desert, but neither of them has the first clue what they’d do with him if they did somehow manage it. The argument is quickly abandoned when her electronics order finally comes in.

The parts are nothing special - an RFID reader and a handful of blank key fobs. The kind of thing you might order for an electronics DIY project. She unboxes them with a sense of profound relief - a technical solution is something she knows how to do, something she can make work. A step forward instead of more useless waiting around. She spends most of a night tinkering with the reader, figuring out how to get it to read and store an image, and how to flash one onto a blank ID. Keith dips in and out of her awareness while she works. He’s out in the desert again, but it feels like he might just be watching the stars. He’s mildly curious about what she’s doing, but never to the point of it being intrusive, and it’s a pleasant sort of tacitly shared company. Once she thinks she’s got it figured out, she swipes her student ID across the reader and flashes its information onto one of the key fobs. She sneaks out to the back entrance of the dormitory to try it out, and can’t quite contain a spike of smug satisfaction when the door opens for her.

It’s a good first step, but giving Keith a copy of her ID is obviously not an option if she wants to avoid suspicion. Getting an image of someone else’s ID involves a little bit of subterfuge and a lot of luck and persistence. She writes a quick script to trigger a read and store an image, and tucks the reader into the front pocket of her bag, its cable trailing inconspicuously (she hopes) out to her computer. She heads to the student lounge during one of its busy periods, and parks herself next to a tired-looking senior cadet whose ID is on a lanyard wrapped around the strap of his shoulder bag. She passes the next hour picking away at her homework and intermittently nudging her bag into his with her foot, trying to get a capture of his card.

She does get a couple of partial reads, but they’re disappointingly garbled and non-functional. It’s frustrating and haphazard, but the partial data is a hopeful sign and she keeps trying. In the end, it takes another three sessions in the lounge and increasing bold positioning of the reader in her bag before she gets something that looks usable. That night, she flashes it onto one of the key fobs and tries it out on the dormitory entrance again. It works without a hitch, and she steals back up to her dorm to flop backwards onto her bunk, spinning the key fob around her finger triumphantly. After a moment, she reaches for her phone.

_I got you your ticket in_   
_ez_

The key fob spins to a halt in the palm of her hand. She clutches it tight and holds it up to inspect in the yellowy light of the dorm lamp. It looks perfectly ordinary. Like it opens up a supply closet or somebody’s bike lock. She sobers, hesitates a little before sending the next message.

_you still sure about this?_

It takes a little bit for Keith to respond, but eventually, he does. His presence drifts into line with hers, and she catches a faint impression of night chill and the cool, smooth planks of the shack’s porch under his fingers.

_yeah_   
_you?_

She thinks about it. There’s something jittery and unstable lodged in the pit of her stomach. It feels like they’re standing on the edge of a precipice. Like one more step forward will crack open all the Garrison’s secrets and lies. Her hand clenches around the key fob until its rounded corner digs into her palm. Matt would have liked it - all the intrigue and ridiculous spy games to spoof an ID would have been right up his alley. He would have conspired with her over some convoluted scheme to sniff ID contents remotely and it would have been way more complicated than it needed to be, but it would probably have worked. Her dad would have officially disapproved and then quietly bribed them to anonymously report the vulnerability. She swallows and forces herself to relax her grip.

_yeah_   
_I’m sure_

_we’re going to figure it out_

There’s a blurred glimpse of blocky, unwelcoming buildings in Keith’s thoughts, and a half-heard echo of a voice and presence at his side like an anchor. The Garrison. Shiro, maybe. She pries her thoughts back from the link until the only thing she can sense from him is the sharp, steady pulse of his mood, constant as a star. She breathes in and lets that certainty moor her.

_yeah_  
 _we will_  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let's pretend that RFID technology is still a prevalent thing in whatever nebulous future VLD takes place in and that it's still real easy to skim.


	8. Chapter 8

Pidge buzzes through her morning classes on the day of the break-in, brain working overtime on half-realized anxieties that she banishes before they can take root and anticipation that she couldn’t banish if she tried. She’s only marginally aware of the instructors’ voices, and the rote journey from room to room is just background noise. At the edge of her thoughts, she can feel Keith, mindlessly taking something apart, focused and tense as an arrow nocked to a bowstring. At a little after one, just as her electronics lecture comes to a close, he taps at the connection. A few seconds later, her phone vibrates.

_heading out_

She grins as she reads the message, feels her heart give a heavy, excited thump. 

  
_okay_   
_be careful_

_you too_

There’s a ghost of his grip on the bike’s handlebars, and then he’s off. She lets out a breath and straightens her expression. It’s time for her to set up her stakeout. She stuffs the phone back in her bag and makes her way out the door with the rest of the class. Hunk, who shares this class with her, gives a wave in her direction, but she pretends not to see and ducks out the building’s side exit, headed for the main lecture hall. It’s a long, blocky concrete edifice whose main entrance faces the administration building across an anemic square of perpetually burned grass. Most of the first two floors are classrooms and student amenities, but the third floor is filled with faculty offices, Commander Iverson’s among them. Pidge passes the bored-looking security guard on duty at the main entrance and turns immediately right into the student lounge. The seat by the door gives her a clear view of both the building’s main entrance and the elevator further down the hall. She crams herself down into the chair and opens up a problem set to pick away at, an eye on the elevator. From there, she just has to wait.

Time drags by, but after about twenty minutes, there’s a brief spike of tension from Keith. An impression of hot air and asphalt smell and something smooth and round gripped in his hand. There’s a moment of uncertainty, and then a rush of satisfaction. A minute later, her phone vibrates.

_key worked_

She relaxes.

_of course it did_   
_he’s not out yet_

_I’m going around to the back_

_I’ll tell you when to go_

_okay_

She checks the time. 1:22. According to his schedule, Iverson should have a meeting in the administration building starting in about eight minutes. They just have to wait.

It feels like it takes forever, but it actually takes only about five minutes before she hears the elevator doors chime and Commander Iverson passes by the student lounge doorway and out through the main entrance. She watches him start briskly in the direction of Administration before messaging Keith.

_he’s out_   
_go up the back stairs_   
_hurry_

He doesn’t waste time messaging a reply, but there’s a wordless burst of acknowledgment over the link, and a sense of motion. She waits tensely, counting down the seconds as the sense of motion gives way to a blurred impression of a hallway. They’ve got at most three or four minutes to get in before Iverson’s computer locks itself - it’s all riding on Keith’s ability to get past the locked office door. She feels Keith extract something from his pocket and the dim impression of a thin strip of metal pressing against his fingertips. He concentrates for a few seconds while she holds her breath, and then there’s a snap of satisfaction and a tactile click. A few seconds later, her phone buzzes again.

_made it_

She gets a bright, indistinct impression of the glow of a monitor and the barely-there feedback of a haptic display. She lets out a breath and feels a grin cross her face. 

_nice_   
_you good to go?_

It should be fine from here. The difficult part is over. Iverson’s meeting is scheduled to last the full hour - that should be plenty of time. All Keith needs to do is run her script and get out.

There’s a rush of confidence over the link, and the satisfying soft click of the drive sliding home. 

_yeah I’m good_

Two minutes pass, and then five, and nothing untoward happens. A little of the anxiety comes back as five minutes turn into seven with no sign of an end. She sends Keith a cautious mental prod and gets back a sense of boredom and the vague idea of a progress bar. Her phone buzzes.

_30 percent_

_search or download?_

_download_

Her brows raise, and she feels a spark of excitement. If it’s taken this long to get to thirty percent on the download, they’ve found something big. Keith catches onto that thought, and she feels him echo back that thrill.

“Hey, Pidge!”

She starts as Lance and Hunk thump down into the seats next to her.

“Hey,” says Hunk. “Tried to catch you at the end of class, but you ran out of there in a hurry.” He eyes her, quick and perceptive, and gives a faint frown. “Everything okay, man?”

She shakes away from the connection. “Yeah, fine. Just had to grab something from my room.”

His expression clears and he nods. “Ah, I hear you. I’m always forgetting stuff.”

Lance leans around him, his upper half sprawled lankily out on the table. “ _Annn_ yways. We’re studying for the operations exam tonight. You want to come? Hunk is bringing snacks.”

She blinks, thrown a little off-kilter at both the distraction and the invitation. It’s just a study session, not a big deal, but even so she’s kind of touched to be included. Even if it does come at the worst possible time. “I… yeah, sure,” she says at last, a little awkwardly. “Thanks.” There’s another buzz from her phone and she glances to the side.

_60 percent_

Over halfway done. Just a little bit longer. She forces her fingers to relax their grip on her stylus.

“Awesome. Figure we can meet up here around seven?”

He waits for a confirmation and she nods. 

“You won’t regret it, dude. Hunk made these dumpling-things last time? Just…” Lance makes a clutching gesture in the air, expression rapturous. “Ugh. Perfection in fried dough form.”

Hunk steeples his fingers thoughtfully. “I was thinking nachos this time.”

“Hunk, if you make nachos I’ll be ruined for fast food nachos for life.”

“Good.”

“How can you-”

The whir of the main entrance sliding open catches her attention, and Pidge looks up in time to watch Commander Iverson pace past the lounge, heading for the elevator. Her thoughts go cold and numb and she snaps her gaze over to the wall clock, heart pounding. It’s only been about twenty minutes.

She shoves at the link and Keith’s attention swings toward her.

“Pidge?” 

Hunk is looking at her expectantly, and she realizes he’s just asked her something. She grabs for the phone. “Sorry, I have to answer this.”

He waves a hand. “Sure, go ahead.” Lance wriggles his eyebrows and says something about a girlfriend, but she’s already typing.

_he’s back early_   
_get out of there_

There’s a gut-clenching jolt of adrenaline and a snarl of tangled, staticky ideas too fast for her to decode. Then something in Keith’s presence tips, like a pile of odd-shaped parts relaxing into gravity, and his thoughts lock into something cool and sharp.

_94 percent_

She stares uncomprehendingly at the phone for a second and gives the link another hard shove. _What the hell are you doing?_ she thinks as loudly as she can. There’s no reply on Keith’s end but that stubborn focus, and finally it sinks in that he’s not moving.

Down the hall, the elevator doors ding.

“Shit,” she hisses out, and lurches to her feet. Hunk and Lance look up in alarm. “Sorry,” she blurts, and scrambles for the door. She makes it out in time to see the elevator doors close behind Iverson’s coattails and keeps going, racing for the stairs at the end of the hallway. She’s not sure what she’s going to do - there’s a vague notion that maybe she can delay or distract Iverson somehow, buy Keith some time. 

As she hits the second stairwell, there’s a beat of triumphant satisfaction from Keith and the rocking click of him pulling the drive out of the port. He’s got it.

_So move,_ she thinks at him, and hauls at the stairwell door. 

Three things happen almost simultaneously:

The stairwell door bursts open, giving Pidge a clear view down the hallway.

Keith steps out of Iverson’s office.

The elevator chimes and Commander Iverson emerges.

For one horrible second, nothing seems to move. And then there’s a stomach-dropping lurch of realization from Keith. Iverson’s eye widens and his expression turns thunderous. 

“Kogane?”

Keith bolts for the stairwell, going so fast Pidge has to flatten herself against the wall behind the door to avoid getting trampled. He jumps the short flight of stairs to the next landing down and books it. Behind her, Iverson is barking into his phone in short, clipped sentences. She has time to catch “security” and “Kogane” before she darts down the stairs after Keith. All she can sense through the link is a blur of motion and impact. As she gets to the bottom of the stairs, his thoughts jerk sharply. There’s a wrench, and a metallic stab of pain in his shoulder. Alarmed, she shoves past the door and into the main floor. The hallway is crowded with a handful of curious cadets. She spies Lance and Hunk in a cluster of students trickling out from the lounge. A little past the lounge door, the security guard she passed on her way in has Keith scruffed by his collar, an arm twisted behind his back. Heart in her mouth, Pidge slips out the stairwell doors and draws closer, until she’s hovering at the edges of the crowd. A few seconds later, heavy steps thump down the stairs behind her and Commander Iverson strides down the hall, red-faced and scowling. Outside, another security guard approaches. She inches closer into the small cluster of students.

“Is that Keith?” She jumps and finds Lance at her shoulder, staring incredulously. “What’s _he_ doing here?”

Down the hall, Iverson and the guards confer. Iverson says something to Keith. He doesn’t reply, jaw clenched sullenly shut. All she gets through the link is a stubborn sense of resistance. A beat passes. Iverson shakes his head, and the guard pulls both of Keith’s hands behind him. The other pulls a set of cuffs off his belt, and her stomach plummets.

“Looks serious,” says Hunk, quiet and unhappy.

Lance scoffs, but his expression is uncertain. “Keith’s a basket case.”

“Shut up,” she snaps, before she can stop herself.

“What-” Lance starts to say, but is interrupted as the whole procession marches down the hall toward the interior of the building, Iverson at the lead. 

“Enough gawking, cadets. Gossip on your own time.” The crowd mills and he takes another step forward. “You heard me - show’s over. Get moving.” Reluctantly, students trickle back into the lounge, and Pidge is caught up in the flow. She tries to catch Keith’s eye as he passes, but he’s scowling fixedly ahead. They turn down a side hall and she’s left hovering awkwardly at the lounge door with an handful of other students.

“What was that?”

“Was that Kogane? Didn’t he drop out?”

“I heard expelled.”

She swallows and takes a breath before snatching her bag up from the table and shoving her computer into it. “I’m going,” she mutters to Lance and Hunk, knowing she sounds short and not able to care. “Still need to finish the lab report for Li. Not going to get anything done here.” She shoves past the crowd in the hallway in the opposite direction from where they’d taken Keith and turns into the grungy single-occupancy bathroom at its end, locking the door behind her. For a second she stares at herself in the mirror, wide-eyed and pale, before turning away to lean back against the door. 

“What the hell, Keith?”, she mutters furiously. What the hell is he doing? She wants whatever the Garrison knows about Kerberos so much it’s been gnawing a hungry, aching hole in her chest for weeks and she knows Keith wants it just as badly. But he’s going to be arrested. He’s going to face criminal charges. He might go to _prison_.

There’s a sting in her hand and she abruptly realizes shes clutching the strap of her bag so tight the buckle’s gouged a divot into her palm. She takes a breath and carefully relaxes her grip. After a moment, she taps at the link. A couple of seconds go by where she can’t really sense anything but stubbornness and a jittery haze of leftover adrenaline, but then there’s an answering tap, accompanied by a sense of tired familiarity and a vague ache in his shoulder.

_Where are you?_ She thinks as hard as she can. She’s not sure such a specific question will make it over the connection - she’s never gotten words from Keith. But they’ve never really tried to communicate over the link purposefully either. 

Enough of it must come through. There’s a hazy impression of his shoulder against a door and the brassy gleam of numbers. Room 103.

“Okay,” she says aloud. “Okay. I’m going to get you out.” That must come through too, because there’s a snap through the connection, a jagged spike of alarm and a snarled, roiling tangle of worry and refusal. _Shut up,_ she pushes at him, and hoists her bag higher on her shoulder before easing the door open. 

The hall is fortunately empty, and she pauses a moment to consider her options. “Room 103,” she mutters to herself. “Right.” She eyes the side passage that leads to it, but after a moment, discards the direct approach. Instead, she turns herself back in the direction of the stairwell. She tramps up the to the second floor and cuts through the hall to the building’s other side. There, she takes the stairs down again to the ground floor. It puts her close to Room 103 on the opposite side of the hall from the student lounge and the main entrance, hopefully in a direction nobody will really be paying attention to. Cautiously, she cracks the stairwell door and cranes her head to peer around the doorframe. Room 103 is closed and quiet. The security guard from earlier stands next to it, his radio in his hand, wearing an expression somewhere between bored and annoyed. She holds her breath, and after a second, he straightens the collar of his uniform and paces towards the the end of the hall, radio raised to his mouth.

“Kid’s locked up for now. What’s the ETA on the transport?” There’s a brief silence, and then a hissing crackle from the radio.

“Fifteen minutes is what they’re saying. Stand by at the main entrance to direct.”

He grimaces. “Copy that.” The radio goes quiet, and he draws himself up and heads down the hallway.

Once the sound of his steps has faded, Pidge carefully walks over to Room 103. “Keith?” she tries, as quietly as she can.

There’s a stir of movement from the other side of the door, and an unhappy, anxious ripple through the link. “Pidge, what are you doing? Get out of here.”

“Shut up. _You_ were supposed to get out of here.”

“The whole point of this was to keep you clean!” A whipcrack of frustration goes through the link, and she scowls at the door. There’s a twist and strain in his shoulders as he reaches for something. “We got the data, okay? I can reach my pockets. I’m putting the drive in the trash. You can get it after.”

“I said shut up,” she hisses. “I’m getting you out of there.”

“Leave it, Pidge. You’re going to get caught. I’ll figure something out.”

“Oh yeah?” she bites out. “Like what?”

A slight hesitation. “There’s a window,” he mutters.

“With your hands cuffed?” she scoffs incredulously. “Yeah, that’s a great plan, genius.”

He doesn’t answer, but his thoughts take on a speculative tinge, and there’s a sudden pressure in his wrists as he pulls them back against the cuffs. Dimly, she can feel him trying to gauge whether he can skin himself out of them and how much it’ll hurt. “Yeah, no,” she snaps. “Save the gory escapades for a last resort.” She thinks back to the feel of something thin and narrow across his fingertips when he’d broken into Iverson’s office. “You’ve got picks, right? Can you slide them under the door?”

“Will you just-”

“We’re talking about this later, but I’m not leaving,” she grinds out. “Can you or can’t you?”

There’s a silence and another burst of frustration, but finally he lets out a sharp breath. “Maybe. They’re in my pocket too.” 

She feels secondhand the strain in his shoulders as he twists to get at them. A nerve-wracking minute goes by, and then there’s a pair of tiny, high-pitched metallic impacts on the vinyl floor. A second later, she hears a scuffing sound and a shadow covers the space under the door. A pair of thin metal slivers inch out and she crouches to pick them up. One’s a cheap flathead screwdriver, the flattened end of its blade bent at a ninety degree angle. The other is a narrow strip of metal that might once have been half of a pair of tweezers. It’s been painstakingly filed down, its tip bent up into a hook. She stares at them and then eyes the lock.

“Do you know how to use them?” Keith asks suspiciously after a second.

“Not really,” she admits. She’s got some idea of what’s inside a door lock, but isn’t exactly sure how that translates to the tools. “You’re going to have to walk me through it.”

There’s a weird hesitation, and for a second she thinks he’s going to argue again. But then something yields, and a flurry of ghost sensations tumbles over the link. There’s the careful pressure of the picks in his hands and a notion of probing and testing and sudden give. “I… Okay,” he says, and the brief silence that follows is more uncertain than stubborn, like he’s trying to put his thoughts into the right order. “You need to get the screwdriver in first. Put a little bit of pressure on it.” 

She darts a quick glance down the hallway before bending down to insert the screwdriver into the keyhole. It slides in to the shoulder of the bend, and she tentatively rests her palm on the handle and pushes it down.

“Not that much pressure,” Keith interjects, alarmed, and she hastily lifts her hand.

“Some of us don’t have a wealth of breaking and entering experience to draw on here, okay?” 

“I don’t-!” She blinks at that sudden burst of frustration, but he tamps it down and goes on before she can really react. “Nevermind. Doesn’t matter. Get the pick in next.”

She slides the pick into the lock and pushes it in until she feels it stop. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine.” It comes out brusque and uncomfortable. She takes the hint and leaves it. “There’s a bunch of little pins in the top. You need to push them all up. You’ll feel them catch. Just don’t push them up too far.”

She frowns. “How do I know if they’re up too far?”

There’s an inarticulate grasping feeling in the link that winds up collapsing in on itself. “Just don’t overdo it.” 

She scowls and probes at the lock’s interior, dragging the pick forward and feeling it catch and snag unevenly. It feels weirdly out of step with the faint sense-impressions she gets from Keith, and she abruptly realizes he’s used to doing this with his left hand. She pushes tentatively at one of the uneven points. It retreats up and catches and she feels a tick of satisfaction. She finds and pushes against others, but the satisfaction quickly withers and dies. Even when she’s sure she has them all up, the door stays stubbornly locked.

She takes a breath and shoves down an edge of panic. She’s not sure how much time has passed, how much time she has left before the transport the guard was talking about shows up. 

“Pidge,” Keith starts.

“Pidge? What the hell are you _doing?_ ”

“Shit!” her voice comes out in an embarrassing squeak and she jerks backwards, the picks clattering onto the floor.

“I mean,” drawls Lance from where he and Hunk crowd the door to the stairwell, “I’m pretty sure I know what you’re doing, but I’m not clear on the why.” He sobers. “Seriously, man, what are you doing? You could get in so much trouble.”

She finds her voice again. “None of your business.”

His brows knit. “I mean, maybe, but you were acting weird and we were worried. And, dude, I gotta tell you, you’re not making me less worried here.”

“Just-”

Hunk’s eyes dart between her and the door, and he frowns. “Is that… is Keith in there?”

In the back of her mind, she feels Keith tense. She doesn’t say anything, but Lance takes one look at her and his mouth snaps shut. “Oh man. Dude. Just leave it. I don’t know what happened out there, but it looked serious. Keith is absolutely not worth that kind of trouble.”

Her fists clench, and she feels something snap. “Just shut up, okay? Keith’s my friend. The only reason he came here in the first place was because of me, and now he’s going to get arrested if I can’t get this open, so just leave, okay?” She swallows, and to her vague horror, feels a prickling at the corners of her eyes.

Lance takes a step back, hands raised. “Keith’s your friend? Mister Too-Good-for-the-Rest-of-Us prodigy? _That_ Keith?” His expression falls into something more sympathetic and he sighs. “Pidge-”

Hunk gives the closed door of Room 103 another long glance, and then something firms in his expression and he takes a long step out from the stairwell. He kneels down to sweep the picks into his hand before she’s realized it. “Here,” he says quietly. “Let me try.”

_“Hunk?”_ says Lance, aghast.

Hunk, still kneeling at the door, ducks his head bashfully. “You know me. I get nervous. Having something to do with my hands helps. Used to do this with old padlocks all the time just to keep busy.” He slots the screwdriver and pick into the lock and probes carefully, with the efficiency of familiarity. He glances up and gives Pidge a somewhat wavery smile. “It doesn’t sound like he hurt anyone or anything.”

She shakes her head. “No!”

Hunk’s smile solidifies. “See? And he’s Pidge’s friend.” There’s a minute click and the door swings open. 

Keith is standing stiffly in the middle of the room facing them. Hunk takes a cautious step inwards. “You’re, um. Keith, right? I’m Hunk.”

Keith blinks uncertainly. “Uh. Hi?”

Lance shoulders into the room. “Hey, Kogane. You better not be setting Pidge up for something here.”

Keith’s expression goes flat and he blinks harder. “Do I know you?”

While Lance sputters, Hunk gestures at Keith’s cuffed wrists. “Do you want me to…?”

He gives a curt nod. “Do it.”

“Hurry,” adds Pidge. Keith catches her eye and jerks his head towards the trashcan. She gets an impression of opening his hand to let something small and rectangular drop into the wastebasket by the desk. She nods and goes over to it, lifts a rumpled wad of paper up to grab the drive.

“Do I even want to know?” mutters Lance.

“No,” she says. 

There’s a muffled click, and Keith pulls his arms out in front of him with a relieved breath, rolling his shoulders. “Thanks,” he nods to Hunk. 

“Okay, great,” says Lance. “Now that we’re done with the Houdini act, we should probably get out of here.”

“Don’t need to tell me that,” Keith mutters, making his way to the back of the room.

Lance eyes him and squints narrowly. “Seriously? The window?”

Pidge drifts over alongside Keith. The window’s on the back side of the building, looking out on a crowded corner of the student parking lot. They’re on the ground floor, so it’s not much of a drop. She nods sharply. “Less chance of getting caught than going out the front.”

Lance and Hunk exchange a glance, and then the former sighs and drags a chair over to wedge under the door handle. Something relaxes in her chest and she breathes out a relieved breath. “Thanks, guys.”

“Don’t worry about it,” says Hunk after a minute, coming over to anxiously frown out the window with them. “You’re, uh. You’re really going to have to explain all this though.”

“I promise. I’ll explain. Later.” Hunk nods, satisfied, and turns his attention to helping Keith pry the window open as wide as it can go. They’re momentarily stymied by a screen that seems to be permanently attached to the window frame, but Keith hisses and pulls out a pocket knife, cutting them a choppy exit. 

“Seriously?” mutters Lance.

“Seriously?” she echoes, shooting Keith a skeptical sideways glance.

“It’s practical,” he replies stolidly, shoulders hunched.

He drops out the window and she follows. As Lance is halfway through the window, there’s a rattling at the door handle.

“Hurry!” she hisses.

“I’m going!”

“Oh _no_ ,” says Hunk.

Lance heaves himself out the window, limbs flailing before he catches himself. Hunk hastily throws his leg over the windowsill, just in time for the door to burst open. There’s a shout from inside, and Hunk yelps. All three of them leap to pull him down the rest of the way. He tumbles out the window, and they’re all sent sprawling onto the ground. She opens her eyes in time to catch a glimpse of the security guard from earlier and a cop leaning over the windowsill looking down at them before the link jolts like a live wire and Keith yanks her the rest of the way up.

“Come on!”

“Hold it right-” the cop starts, but they’re already sprinting around the corner of the building towards the parking lot.

The security guard barks something into his radio, and distantly, she registers a breathless, panicked “Oh man, oh man, oh man…” from Hunk behind her. They careen around the back of the administration building and pelt across the lot to the far corner, where Keith’s bike is parked behind a truck. A door slams somewhere behind them, but she doesn’t look back. Keith slings himself onto the bike and she piles on behind him.

“Get on the back!” he roars, and the bike dips and rebalances as Lance and Hunk heave themselves onto the stabilizers. Keith slams the ignition home. The bike’s engine coughs and then thunders as he guns the acceleration. She hangs onto him for dear life and they speed out of the lot, a small crowd of curious students and red-faced security personnel trickling out the doors behind them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a story about people who are absolutely, definitely, one-hundred percent making rational decisions and coping with loss in healthy ways.

**Author's Note:**

> Gentron 2020, prompt "telepathic bond."
> 
> This is a bit out of my usual wheelhouse, but I started writing it and it got long, so, uh, expect updates as the rest of it gets finished and edited.
> 
> (My tumblr is [here](https://fistfulofgammarays.tumblr.com/) if you want to talk at me.)


End file.
